No matter the size or scope of your business, achieving great user experience (UX) can be a challenge. Common issues like low adoption and engagement often plague technology solutions, leaving teams frustrated after investing significant time, energy, and budget. When the expected ROI doesn't materialize, it’s easy to feel stuck or unsure of the next steps.
If this sounds familiar, a UX Audit could be the key to unlocking clarity and delivering results. By analyzing your product's usability, usefulness, and overall experience, a UX Audit provides actionable insights to enhance user satisfaction, drive engagement, and boost ROI.
Whether you've just launched a new feature, noticed a drop in engagement, or simply want to ensure your product is ready to scale, a UX Audit is a strategic step forward.
What is a UX Audit?
A UX Audit is an in-depth assessment of an existing digital experience. UX Audits can help businesses understand opportunities for improvement, sources of unnecessary friction, and features that might need to be fixed to meet certain standards. These are all ways that a UX Audit can help modernize a product and identify top priorities for a redesign.
What is UI vs UX?
UI and UX are often interchangeable but represent distinct aspects of a digital product's design. Understanding the difference between the two is key to creating an exceptional experience for your users.
UI (User Interface) refers to the elements of a digital product that users see and interact with—buttons, menus, typography, color schemes, and overall layout. It's about making the product visually appealing and easy to navigate.
UX (User Experience), on the other hand, encompasses the entire journey a user takes with your product. It's about how the product feels and functions, addressing questions like:
- Is it intuitive to use?
- Does it solve the user's problem efficiently?
- Does the experience keep users coming back?
While UI focuses on the look and feel, UX focuses on the function and flow. A great digital product integrates both seamlessly—offering a visually stunning interface while ensuring the experience is smooth, satisfying, and tailored to the user's needs.
When these two elements work together, they create a cohesive and impactful product that enhances user engagement, loyalty, and satisfaction.
UX Audit vs Design Audit
While both a UX Audit and a Design Audit aim to improve a product’s performance, they focus on different aspects of your digital experience. Understanding the distinction between the two can help you decide which approach aligns best with your current goals.
UX Audit
A UX Audit examines the overall experience users have with your product. It focuses on functionality, usability, and the emotional journey of the user as they interact with your software or website. Key questions addressed in a UX Audit include:
- Are users able to complete their tasks efficiently?
- Are there any areas of friction causing user frustration?
- How well does the product align with user needs and expectations?
The outcome of a UX Audit typically includes prioritized recommendations for improving navigation, accessibility, and overall user satisfaction. It’s an essential step for ensuring your product meets functional requirements and provides a seamless and engaging experience.
Design Audit
A Design Audit, in contrast, is more focused on your product's visual and branding aspects. It evaluates the consistency, appeal, and alignment of design elements with your brand identity. Key areas analyzed in a Design Audit include:
- Are the typography, color palette, and imagery cohesive and on-brand?
- Is the visual hierarchy clear, guiding users intuitively through the content?
- Do the design elements enhance or detract from the overall usability?
The results of a Design Audit often include recommendations for creating a more polished and professional look, improving visual consistency, and ensuring brand alignment.
Who are UX Audits for?
UX Audits are good for both B2B and B2C companies. Any organization seeking to reconcile multiple products or align its technology more closely with customer or employee needs will benefit from a UX Audit. The key is being willing and able to take on the recommendations that result from the audit.
Crema’s UX Audit Process
There are a variety of methodologies out there for performing UX Audits. At Crema, we have an established process that resulted from our experience leading many UX audits with our clients and seeing them improve their experiences by following our recommendations.
First, our team meets with clients to gain an understanding of what their product is meant to do and what use cases they want to evaluate. Then we get to work, surveying users, discovering their biggest pain points, and walking through the product as if we are the user.
We evaluate the product according to a checklist of UX principles and well-established heuristics we’ve created through years of experience improving clients’ tools.
Usability, utility, desirability, and accessibility are some of the most important principles that we grade a tool against.
Usability
Usability and utility are some of the biggest principles we look at when grading the UX in a tool, and it’s what usually comes to mind when thinking about UX. Within the usability principle, we ask questions like:
- Can the user accomplish tasks without friction?
- Does the experience help prevent the user from errors?
- Does it help them recover from errors such as typos or incorrect passwords?
- Do all of the buttons go where they’re supposed to go?
- Can users find what they’re looking for quickly and easily?
Users will inevitably make mistakes, but user experience with usability in mind will help prevent and correct them.
Utility
While usability handles how a tool feels and behaves, utility is about what the technology offers. We conduct a competitive market audit to determine how the product stacks up against other options and identify areas where utility can be improved.
Desirability
Desirability is underestimated, but 95% of a brand’s perception comes from how the experience looks and feels to the end user. Users must want to use it and choose it over the available alternatives. Desirability involves evaluating the aesthetics, modernity, and ease of use.
Accessibility
Accessibility is important because we want everyone to be able to use a product or tool regardless of any disabilities or environments. Tools should be optimized for use indoors, and outdoors, on various devices such as tablets, smartphones, or laptops, and on different platforms.
With the results from the checklist, we create a list of pain points and areas for improvement.
Finally, we turn the list of pain points into recommendations for design changes such as functional improvements, content updates, and anything that needs to be done to improve the overall experience of the technology.
Wrap up
Companies that don’t invest in their user experience can be surpassed by the competition with better tooling and processes that support it. According to a Forrester Research report, every dollar invested in UX creates $100 in return. And the Design Management Institute reported that companies prioritizing design, including UX, outperform the S&P 500 by 228% over ten years. This statistic underscores the competitive advantage gained through investment in UX.
We recommend a UX audit to any organization that feels the effect of low utilization, inaccurate data, and drawn-out tasks.
Investments in UX are poised for sustained growth across all sectors of technology. Given the potential for a substantial return on investment, it’s impossible to ignore how prioritizing UX is a great first step towards making a more significant impact on users with your product.
