5 simple ways a UX audit can help a freelancer’s website

As a freelancer, conducting a UX audit may be essential for improving your website. But what is a UX audit and how will you benefit from this? We gained some insider information from a professional UX designer who has kindly shared 5 pointers about a basic UX audit that may help you with improving your online presence.

Why do you need to do a UX audit?

The process, usually conducted by a UX designer, uses various methods to pinpoint areas of a digital product that need improvement, to help increase your users’ conversion rates. It usually involves the client, as well as the UX team, to come up with goals, generating reports, and creating action steps to improve a website, app, or software, to achieve a better return on investment (ROI).

Done right, even a basic UX audit can greatly improve user satisfaction and website navigation, among others.

1. Clearly define the goals

To start things off, you need to write down some goals that you want to set. This will help you set the KPIs and the timeline of your project. Here are a few questions to ask yourself:

1. Does the project have a purpose?
2. What are the product’s goals?
3. What is the ideal complete overview of the product?

Knowing the answer will help you out when getting started on the UX audit.

2. Set a timeline

Keep everything on track by setting a timeline. The sooner you finish the UX audit, the sooner you can reap the rewards but you don’t want to make careless mistakes. Set milestones for specific dates as well as individual timelines for the audit. Make sure that you set aside a couple of hours a day between your other projects and focus on completing the UX audit.

3. Know your target clients/users

Who will be using your website, application, or software? Who are your target clients/users? What are their goals? What are your goals? Knowing your target users and how they will use your product is one of the most important hacks to improve conversion. It will help skyrocket user satisfaction and achieve their goals.

Use various UX design tools to research the habits of your target users. Here’s a quick list of tools you can use:

Hotjar – This online tool will help to discover user behaviour. It will answer questions such as: which pages do your users visit on your website? Hotjar offers a free version but has limited functions. Pricing for this tool starts from USD89 to USD589 per month.

Mixpanel – Another tool that you can use is Mixpanel. It helps you collect accurate data, identify trends, and set goals based on user behaviour; so you can take the appropriate action to improve your website.

Google Analytics – One of the best free tools you can use to gain valuable data for your UX audit is Google Analytics. By applying its install code to your website, Google can track user behaviour for each page and give you a detailed report on page visits, bounce rates, and other key performance indicators (KPIs), to help you formulate a better website design.

By using these tools, you gain a better understanding of how your users navigate your website.

4. Note down your findings

You can obtain plenty of data from a simple UX audit that can help improve your website. The insights you gather can help improve the UX of your website for future updates.

Take time to note down any findings such as vulnerabilities, problems, and the strong points of your website, app, or software. If you don’t know how to make a report, HubSpot has a sample that you can take inspiration from.

5. Look for trends

Aside from reporting your findings, use the data to search for trends and tendencies that your target users are doing. This will help you come up with data-backed findings from which a strategy to optimize the UX can be made.

Use a heat map to find out which parts of your website each user has been clicking. Meanwhile, a scroll map will give an idea of how far down a page your user scrolled. Both of these will provide important insights and trends regarding search terms, visitor sources and other elements.

Clickheat – This is a downloadable tool that can show your visitor’s mouse activities. It can show you where the hot zones are, i.e. areas of a page with many clicks. It can also show the cold zone or areas of a page with fewer clicks.

Crazyegg – Founded by digital marketing expert Neil Patel, Crazyegg is an online tool that can show you a heat and scroll map. You can get a free 30-day trial upon sign-up. Paid packages start from USD29 to USD189 per month.

UX Check – This is a Google Chrome extension that helps UX designers spot usability issues through its comprehensive evaluation. UX Check identifies issues using Nielsen’s 10 heuristics or creates a custom list to identify issues within a website.

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About the Author:

“I am a futurist who spends most of my time monitoring social behavior in search of new consumer trends. I use the information to create viral and useful content as part of the new media strategy. I’m interested in technology, market behavior, new media, environment, sustainability, futuristic scenarios, and businesses.” Kimberly Grimms