Your UX audit blueprint: How to run UX audits (+ downloadable checklist)

There's always room to improve your product's accessibility, make the interface more appealing, or provide a better overall user experience. But following your gut isn't enough—to pull it off, you'll need data and user insights.

A UX audit is the process of reviewing your product’s user experience (UX) to identify pain points and bottlenecks. Researchers use audits to gather insights about a product's design, usability, and information architecture—giving UX teams a guiding light for improving the product.

The thought of starting a UX audit can be overwhelming, especially if you're unclear on the first steps. It's all about using a structured approach to identify what’s working and what’s not.

A complete UX audit involves a variety of UX research methods and approaches, including usability testing, user interviews, A/B testing, and more.

Conducting regular UX audits means you can continue to build user-centric products. It allows you to streamline the user journey, enhance product performance, and ultimately, boost customer satisfaction and retention.

In this article, we cover the why and when of UX audits, and the steps to perform a UX audit that hits your goals—with best practices from industry experts.

Your product's UX has a direct impact on your revenue; making it easier or harder for people to achieve their goals, such as making a purchase or subscribing to a service. Bad UX can damage your brand perception and increase your customer acquisition costs (CAC) as you need to invest more money to get users to convert.

UX audits, also known as UX reviews or UX diagnoses, enable you to assess user needs and take steps to improve the user interface (UI), usability, and user journey to deliver a positive user experience that results in higher customer user satisfaction. The aim is to make your product more usable and accessible, allowing users to accomplish their goals with minimal effort.

In particular, a UX audit can help you identify:

UX reviews provide actionable recommendations, informed by evidence, that will allow you to implement tweaks and changes that will eventually lead to a better product. For example, the insights you get can result in actions that reduce the number of clicks to complete a specific task or the time spent on manual data entry.

Depending on needs and goals, UX audits can take many forms, including heuristic evaluation, usability testing, user interviews, and more. All these methods can help improve your product's UX when conducted regularly. However, you should conduct a complete UX review at least once a year.

There's no hard rule for when to review your product's UX, as it'll depend on multiple factors in your product's lifecycle, like how often you launch new features or redesigns. "If your team ships fast and adds many new features, you should do it more often," says Manjot Pal, Product Lead at Houzz.

It's a good practice for any product team to conduct UX audits regularly, but you'll also want to conduct a user experience audit:

Now that we've set the basics, it's time to highlight how you can establish a successful UX audit process. Each assessment is unique, but here are seven steps you can follow to make the most out of your UX review:

UX audits are exploratory by nature, so it’s pretty easy to get derailed. Without a specific and clear goal, your UX audit could go on forever. It’s easy to be distracted by an interesting user comment or a new pain point to investigate. You'll likely uncover issues that require further research during your audit, but put those aside for the time being and stay focused on your objective.

Set goals with stakeholders to ensure you’re on the same page—you could even host a stakeholder interview to gauge their vision, goals, and business needs.

Aim to set goals with “the biggest potential of pushing your business forward,” says Bansi Mehta, CEO of Koru. For example, reducing the user onboarding time or simplifying the sign-up flow.

You can also use this time to define the audit’s scope. Determine when you’ll run the review, how long it’ll last, and what areas of the product you’ll examine. Let’s say your product creates automated business intelligence (BI) dashboards. If your goal is to reduce the user onboarding time, you might want to review the UX starting when the user signs up and ending when they produce the first dashboard.

Before you begin your assessment, review previous UX audits to get the full context of where you’re currently at. Then, collect all relevant product performance analytics and recent user feedback. You might need to observe user behavior patterns through performance analytics data like time spent on specific pages, heatmaps, number of sessions, or number of clicks.

Collecting these metrics helps auditors better understand how users interact and navigate your product—allowing them to adjust the study goals. For example, data showing that your users can find the sign-up button easily but leave when you ask them to enter their card information might indicate that the flow isn't the problem.

A key indicator of your UX is the number of clicks needed to perform a task. Once you’ve defined your goal and know exactly which parts of the product you'll be reviewing, count the number of clicks or steps a user takes to complete a task. “Compare this against your UX from three to six months before or against your competitors to see how this metric has changed,” says Manjot. “Start removing each step one at a time and see if you can still perform a successful action, e.g., signing up for a new account."

Heuristics in UX refer to a set of guidelines or ‘rules of thumb’ used to evaluate the usability of a user interface. The concept was popularized by Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich, who transformed their research observations into a set of heuristics that many designers now use as a checklist to evaluate the interface usability.

Jakob Nielsen, co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, introduced a set of usability heuristics, which are:

Heuristic evaluation is a budget-friendly way to identify UX issues and review user interfaces, without recruiting and testing participants—but this doesn’t mean it can replace user research. As an industry standard, three to five evaluators (usually designers and researchers) should perform a heuristic evaluation on the same UI to reduce biases.

As the Nielsen Norman Group explains, “User experience design is highly contextual. To design good experiences, you’ll still need to test with actual users. But heuristic evaluations can complement your team’s research work.” For example, you can conduct a heuristic evaluation of your product to learn which parts of the design you should focus on when testing.

Evaluating your product's heuristics is a good place to start with your audit, but it's not where it ends. Some other techniques to consider during your audit include:

Heuristic evaluations, user interviews, UX surveys, and usability tests show how users interact with your product. This information can help you improve user interaction by removing unnecessary steps, reducing the need for manual input, and streamlining tasks.

"Reduce the number of clicks if you observe the majority of your customers are selecting the same set of options," explains Manjot. "You can also automate manual data entry by adding auto-fill functionalities. If a user has to enter their first and last name, can you use Google sign-in to autofill this information to get them onboarded faster?"

While reducing the number of clicks generally improves UX, sometimes clicks are your best option. "If the customer is typing a bunch of information, see if you can turn that typing experience into a clicking experience by structuring the common information entered by the customer. Sometimes a few clicks is better than repeatedly entering a bunch of information," adds Manjot.

Turning data from user testing and research into actionable insights isn't necessarily easy—especially because hearing user pain points concerns can make you want to ‘fix’ everything all at once. But to ultimately solve everything, you need to start by prioritizing something.

Go over your research and identify the main problems by analyzing trends and taking note of the most repeated comments. Use The MoSCow Template or The Kano Model to prioritize your solutions.

For example, if you conduct usability tests on 100 users and 82 think the font size is hard to read, with only two complaining about the search bar, focus on changing the font first. Then, you can choose whether or not you want to conduct further research on the search bar functionality.

Now’s the time to share your in-depth findings and put them into practice. Use the insights you uncovered to come up with a UX audit report containing six main areas:

UX audits start and end with a conversation with all stakeholders. Building user-centric products requires internal alignment, so it's vital to share the audit's findings with all stakeholders (product managers, designers, or owners) and outline the next steps together.

You should also inform them about any product changes and updates, so the relevant teams can market, sell, and redesign the product as needed. Finally, remember to assign clear responsibilities and deadlines to ensure the audit's results come to life.

To build a product customers love, you need a good UX. Here are some key boxes you need to tick:

A truly user-centric, intuitive product is one that achieves all seven markers of success. So, it's worth looking into these key UX design principles and using them to steer the criteria of your UX audit.

Here's everything you need to know before you start your next assessment:

Now we’ve covered the strategies and insights for running a successful UX audit, you need an easy way to keep track of them during your review process.

That’s why we’ve created an in-depth UX audit checklist that’s handy and acts as a blueprint for systematically evaluating every critical aspect of your product’s user experience—from the initial user engagement to final conversion points.

Download our complete, editable UX audit checklist template to get a head-start on improving your product’s usability and user satisfaction.

Your product’s design isn’t set in stone. What your users find appealing and easy to use today might change over time. Also, as you grow your business and launch new features, your product risks becoming unnecessarily and unintendedly complex.

For your product to consistently offer a good user experience over time, you need to conduct periodic UX reviews. This means checking your heuristics, identifying usability problems and strengths, having a clear goal, and reviewing previous product data to set benchmarks.

You'll also benefit from using a tool like Maze to run usability tests, get insights into your information architecture, and analyze user flows. Maze gives you access to +50 templates to run multiple UX research methods and collect user insights in hours.

Wrap up your audit by identifying trends in the data, building a report with key findings and actionable advice, and sharing the results with stakeholders for further action. Ready to create better experiences for your users?