How do you think users feel when interacting with your app or website? Does your site inspire positive experiences, or do visitors bounce off without taking action?
The answers depend on the effectiveness of your UX design. A meaningful user experience lets you retain customers’ interest for the long term. It keeps your customers satisfied, increasing traffic and driving sales.
If any aspects of your site or app you suspect are causing difficulties for users and delaying conversions, it’s time for a UX audit.
The good news is that you can do the audit yourself and boost conversions by making it easier for users and visitors to achieve their goals. We’ll discuss the top tips for doing so in this article.
Photo from Moose
A UX audit allows you to identify potential loopholes in your website or digital app that worsens the user experience.
For example, you have an e-commerce site, and you are conducting a UX audit. It may indicate that the payment system is too complicated, causing most visitors to leave your site at the checkout stage. This will lead you to update the checkout options and will affect your bottom line.
To put it simply, a UX audit can help you improve conversions and making it easy for customers to achieve their goals.
Your website is powerful enough to turn mere visitors into buyers and loyal customers. This is why it is essential to ensure that your users have a great website user experience.
Make sure the following factors of UX design are in order:
Your website theme plays a vital role in the overall design and fonts, colors, and typography. But apart from attractivity, it should also be easy to read, with a clear hierarchy of text and headings.
If your visitors don’t understand the content on your page, they’ll exit fast and never return.
Large chunks of text can intimidate the audience and disrupt readability. Use bullet points to highlight the benefits, solutions, or critical features of a product. It will give your visitors the information that they’re looking for.
Look at how web3forms.com uses creative bullet icons to highlight their features.
A view of the web3forms page
Use graphic design tools and software to create cool non-conventional icons for your bullet points. To get users interested in your content, tactfully designed bullet icons can help a great deal.
Minimalistic business icon pack in Simple Small style
It’s also important to include several call-to-action (CTA) throughout your content. CTAs are considered one of the deals that don’t really get much attention once the website goes live. But without a clear and compelling CTA button, your visitors will be at a loss for what to do.
A CTA directs users towards a plan-in-action. Once your website design and content have attracted them towards your business, your CTA button is where they start their customer journey. It can be in the form of a link or a button that helps users take the next step into the sales funnel. Many websites also embed an online scheduling tool that allows visitors to secure an appointment.
The design process should be thought of carefully since you wouldn’t want your website to sound too salesy. Try to use words and phrases that would attract your target audience instead of a basic “Contact Us” or “Click Here.”
Here are some ideas for unique call-to-action:
Here is a nice example of pop-up CTAs that serve to make visitors immediately try Icons8 apps.
Ouch CTA
According to Toronto-based web designer Gary Stevens of Hosting Data, optimizing your website’s design may be difficult. Still, it isn’t impossible: “Design optimizations are probably the hardest to do because what’s good for your visitors might not look good to you. But abiding by design principles – like using directional cues to lead your visitor to a call-to-action – will ensure you achieve higher conversions.”
One of the most frustrating experiences as a website user is to wait forever for the pages to load. Slow load times can be irritating, making them a due cause for high bounce rates.
But the real question is: what is causing these delays?
Chances are your web developer may have forgotten to compress the files or remove errors in the code. Also, those free extra plugins might be teeming with elements that can crash your site.
A view of a Gtmetrix performance report
Some common elements of your website that can be causing a slow page can include:
One of the best strategies to avoid a slow page is to invest in tools such as Google’s PageSpeed Insight or GTMetrix. These kinds of tools will conduct an assessment of your site and identify exactly what is causing it to become slowed down.
Color choices: Most websites have a white background with black text. This is a deliberate decision to ensure maximum readability without putting undue strain on the eyes. Also, the clean and simple website layout is easy to navigate.
A view of the world’s worst site ever
Font styles: Choose fonts that are clear and crisp to read. Most UX experts prefer modern fonts with a thin façade that lends itself well to dynamic designs. However, the most important thing to remember is that the font should be optimized for different devices, so users don’t have to squint or zoom in to read your text.
Here are some of the tools you can use on your app or website to conduct a full UX audit:
Fulcrum’s UX Audit Kit page
It’s easier to gain invaluable insights about your product’s usability with this useful tool. It identifies the issues in your interface, prioritizes those problems, and gives you actionable guidelines on how to solve them.
Furthermore, there are also customizable audit checklists. You can easily save or print them on your dashboard of Notion to use later. You can also leverage the available Notion templates on the platform.
Each template has cards with examples and descriptions. Based on if you meet specific requirements or not, you can drag and drop the particular card into the column of either “Yes” or “No.” When you’re done, you can quickly identify the issues and work to fix them.
Essentially, there are two types of templates: Middle and Junior level. The Junior level consists of templates for forms and fields, mobile UX, login, and architecture. These Notion templates help you ensure that you cover the fundamental UX bases. For example, it gauges whether your website is mobile and desktop-friendly and if each component aligns and makes sense, and if they are easily identifiable.
The Middle-level templates are in-depth ones that perform audit checks like “Visibility of system status” to see if you keep your visitors informed on trends. Aspects like loading, battery life, or Wi-Fi connectivity indicators make a huge difference.
Pingdom main page
Pingdom is a global monitoring solution that can test your website’s performance, helping you deliver your visitors’ best possible user experience. It can analyze your web pages and tell you what elements are making your website slow. Furthermore, it can also help you follow and implement best practices for optimizing your user interface and website speed.
UXCam main page
UXCam helps website owners gain a better understanding of their app through the use of machine learning. It can tell which elements are frustrating your visitors and which pages catch the most attention and traffic. This kind of information can help website owners minimize mistakes and optimize their web pages.
As the cornerstone of your digital presence, your website requires regular assessment and maintenance to continue offering a smooth user journey. A UX audit might be a time-consuming process, but the final product is an optimized website targeted to deliver value to customers.
Ultimately, if you’ve invested time, money, and effort to create your website, you need to measure its performance to gauge ROI. That is where a UX audit can reveal key insights into how close your website is to achieving its goals. If hiring an expert web developer is not viable, you can utilize the methods detailed above to optimize your site’s user experience for your visitors.
Author’s bio: Nahla Davies is a software developer and tech writer. Before devoting her work full time to technical writing, she managed – among other intriguing things – to serve as a lead programmer at an Inc. 5,000 experiential branding organization whose clients include Samsung, Time Warner, Netflix, and Sony.
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