In today's dynamic online world, the need to maintain a high-quality consumer e-shop is crucial to business success. With the arrival of spring, e-commerce entrepreneurs should consider not only refreshing their offerings, but also a thorough overhaul of their e-stores. One of the key tools in improving the user experience in e-commerce is UX auditing. In the following article, we will discuss the steps necessary for an effective e-store audit. However, before we get into practical tips for conducting an e-store audit, let's figure out what exactly a UX audit is.
What is a UX audit?
UX Audit is a key tool for understanding how users interact with your website and how their shopping experience can be improved. It's a hands-on analysis by user experience experts, but also something you can start applying yourself to make your platform more customer-friendly.
What are the benefits of performing a UX audit?
The benefits of performing a UX audit are significant and crucial to the success of your business.
- Identifying usability issues
Conducting a UX audit allows you to locate usability issues that affect the user experience. Identifying these issues early allows you to take action to address them before they negatively impact the overall performance of your business. - Improving overall user satisfaction and engagement
By addressing usability issues, you contribute to improving overall user satisfaction and engagement. This can have a huge impact on customer retention rate, reducing operational costs associated with customer service, and consequently — a positive impact on revenue. - Increase conversion rate
Conversion rate is one of the most important performance metrics and an excellent indicator of the overall health of your e-store. Conducting a comprehensive UX review allows you to get practical tips on how to increase the intuitiveness of the interface, indicate areas for improvement and thus influence the conversion. - Reducing the rate of loss of customers
In a competitive e-commerce environment, customer satisfaction is key to maintaining their loyalty. By improving the usability of the site, users have a better chance of going through the shopping steps smoothly, which in turn affects their satisfaction and desire to return. Conducting a UX audit creates a real opportunity not only to improve user satisfaction, but also to minimize the rate of customer loss, which, as a result, translates into an increase in revenue. - Preservation of competitiveness
In the world of e-commerce, it is important not only to stay in the market, but above all to maintain a competitive advantage. Regularly conducting UX audits becomes a crucial step in identifying areas where your e-store is lagging, opening the door to effective improvements. According to the PwC report, “Prospects for the development of the e-commerce market in Poland 2018-2027" Online sales are expected to double in the coming years. Forecasts include an increase in the number of e-sellers by another 50% and an increase in the number of consumers by 20%. Understanding and adapting to changing customer preferences allows you to be ready for dynamic market challenges.
Checklist before the start of the audit
Before you start an audit, make sure you are prepared to conduct it:
✓ Clearly define the objectives of the audit
Before proceeding with the analysis, specify the objectives of the audit. Do you want to improve conversion, increase customer satisfaction, or maybe optimize the mobile performance of your e-store? Setting goals will allow you to focus on key areas.
✓ Integrate analytics tools with your e-store
Tap into available analytics tools to gather data about user behavior on your site and identify areas for improvement. Tools that can be used for this purpose are Hotjar or Google Analytics.
- Hotjar
Hotjar provides interactive heatmaps that show how users click, scroll, and navigate a website. This helps to identify areas where users may encounter difficulties or problems with navigation. In addition to heatmaps, Hotjar also offers recordings of user sessions or surveys that can provide additional insights into user behavior and preferences.
- Google Analytics
When analyzing the use of your online store, it is important to identify areas that may need improvement to increase overall customer satisfaction. In this context, Google Analytics is a tool that provides data on user behavior, such as time spent on the site, number of visits, pages skipped by customers and popular product browsing paths. This makes it possible to adapt the website to customer expectations and streamline the purchasing process.
✓ Make a review of the results of previous UX audits
Before proceeding with a new UX audit, carefully review the reports from previous evaluations. This will identify previously detected problems and assess the effectiveness of the changes introduced in the meantime. Make sure you take into account any recommendations from previous audits, which will help you focus on areas that need further attention.
✓ Create an audit schedule
Set deadlines and create a clear schedule with milestones to effectively manage the audit process. In theory, an audit can be carried out indefinitely, so it is crucial to be completely clear about each stage. Planning ahead will allow you to focus on key areas and efficiently carry out spring cleaning in the e-shop, avoiding losing control of the project.
Preparing for a UX audit is a key step that allows you to effectively carry out analysis and make improvements, improving the user experience in the e-store.
UX Audit: A Step-by-Step Guide
Once the basics are established, it's time to conduct a UX audit.
Step 1: Heuristic Analysis
It is best to start an e-shop audit from 10 heuristics Created by the Nielsen Norman Group. The term “heuristics” is used because they refer to general principles rather than specific guidelines that a website should meet to ensure a pleasant and trouble-free experience. These universal principles of usability form the basis for designing different types of websites. Examples of heuristics include efficient error handling, maintaining visual consistency, and using friendly navigation such as breadcrumbs.
Step 2: Cognitive Hiking
Cognitive Walkthrough is a method that involves taking on the role of a user exploring an e-shop and trying to perform typical tasks on a website. Within this technique, scenarios are designed that reflect the paths that customers travel in the course of using the e-store. Prepared scenarios cover the key elements of the site, and the analysis focuses on the experiences that the user can experience while performing specific tasks. This method can also be adapted to the specifics of a particular store, taking into account different types of customers, such as new or returning customers, and their individual needs. When conducting this hike, it is important to document the observations, focusing on identifying potential problems.
Step 3: Checklist
A checklist is a set of guidelines that indicates step by step how a customer-friendly e-store website should be constructed. Thanks to it, we can efficiently, point by point verify the compliance of the e-store with proven standards. Quite a few checklists are available for free online.
Step 4: Analyze data from analytics tools
This stage of the UX audit focuses on analyzing the data obtained from analytics tools such as Hotjar and Google Analytics. These valuable tools allow you to explore user behavior, providing relevant information to optimize the customer experience. Using such data, it is possible to notice where in the user's journey people give up the further purchase process or identify a specific point in time at which the conversion rate began to decline.
Importantly, the hypotheses and recommendations that emerged from the previous stages of the audit can be confronted with the available data. If the data supports a given hypothesis, it proves the validity of our predictions.
Step 5: Accessibility
It is equally important to check the availability of the e-store, that is, to determine whether everyone can use it, taking into account people struggling with disabilities. The websites available are usually more friendly to everyone. They are often characterized by faster performance, easier use and a higher place in search results, so it is important to see digital accessibility as an opportunity, not a burden. You can assess accessibility by checking that it complies with established accessibility guidelines, such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). For exploring digital accessibility can also be useful checklist available on the government website.
Step 6: Report with recommendations
Prepare a report on the conducted audit, documenting in detail the identified errors, their description and classification. Errors are worth assessing in terms of their significance:
- Critical Error - this is a problem that prevents the user from going to the next purchase step and significantly hinders further exploration of the e-store.
- Serious error - a problem that can lead to some confusion on the part of the user, but still allows him to achieve the goal.
- Minor error - is a cosmetic error, which does not have a significant impact on the use of the store. In the event that it does not require a large amount of labor, it is worth considering its removal.
The summary of the report should contain a general assessment of the online store. Pay attention to what is especially important to customers and what is missing in it. Based on this, draw up an action plan so that the store is fully useful and convenient for its customers to use.
summary
The UX audit is a powerful tool to identify areas that need improvement in the e-shop. By bringing benefits in the form of increased conversion rates, user satisfaction or reduced development costs, UX auditing has a positive impact on overall business performance. Regardless of your experience as a UX researcher or e-store owner, continuous product improvement is key, and a UX audit is a comprehensive tool to achieve this goal.
