UX Audit Service

The success of your online store does not solely depend on getting traffic to your site. Once users arrive at your site, you must then convert them. Providing a smooth user experience (UX) will help you do so. Our UX audit will identify your site’s usability issues and provide design solutions that will increase user engagement, conversions, and revenue.

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Inside Your UX Audit

The link between UX and conversion rate is often overlooked, especially in the eCommerce world. In reality, providing users with an enjoyable and frictionless shopping experience will influence whether they make a purchase and return to do so repeatedly. A study by Forrester found that better UX design could lead to a 400% uplift in conversions. This is because good UX creates satisfied customers and satisfied customers make purchases. It’s as simple as that. Our audit report will cover all aspects of your site’s user experience, including:

Navigation
On-site Search
Product Feeds
The Checkout Process
The Checkout Process

Website Navigation

On-site Search

Product Listing & Layout

The Checkout Process

Mobile Optimisation

Your UX Audit in More Detail

You will have probably also heard of UI (user interface), as it is a term that often appears alongside UX. UI is concerned with how the site looks (the visual elements the user will interact with) and UX is concerned with how the site feels (the thoughts, feelings, and expectations of the user).

Given that your site’s interface is the medium through which your store is experienced, the two are intimately connected. Our UX audit, therefore, will naturally involve suggesting changes to UI elements. Good UI will make a website aesthetically pleasing, whilst good UX will make that interface easy and enjoyable to use.

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Our audit will examine how easy it is to move between the different pages that make up your website. This will involve an analysis of page structure, navigational menus, and category taxonomy. Your website navigation must be simple and, most importantly, intuitive. Users should be able to move seamlessly between your homepage, category pages, product pages, and any other important page in the customer journey. If they struggle to find what they are looking for, they may easily get frustrated and leave your site. 

There are particular features that we will pay close attention to that are specific to eCommerce sites. For instance, do you have a dedicated category page for new arrivals and/or items on sale? If so, are they foregrounded and easy to find? Ultimately, we will assess whether your site is effectively guiding your customers through their journey to finding a product.

Your site’s search experience – just like its navigation structure – is essential to helping customers find exactly what they are looking for. If they are unable to, your conversions and sales will suffer. In fact, research suggests that 80% of consumers will abandon a site after a poor search experience. Our audit will ask and answer two main questions: 

  • Is your search bar highly visible?

Particularly when it comes to eCommerce stores, users will often head straight to the search bar. Site search immediately gives customers control and – as is well documented – creating personalised customer experiences is very important. Thus, your search bar must be well-positioned and eye-catching. 

  • Are the results your search function produces helpful?

“Helpful” results are those which are accurate, ranked by relevance, and well-formatted. Given that UX design is all about aligning user expectations with reality, what your customer expects to appear after they search is what should appear in reality. Whether they type in a product name, product type, or even a problem-based query (e.g. ankle pain remedy), their search must produce relevant results.

If you have it, we will also analyse your faceted search. This feature is typically seen on eCommerce sites and gives customers the ability to narrow results by selecting pre-defined categories. 

How your products appear across product and category pages is very important. Firstly, we will examine whether your site has effective product filtering, categorisation, and sorting mechanisms that ensure they are grouped correctly. Secondly, we will assess the presentation of the products themselves. Do you use high-quality images? Are your product descriptions well-formatted? Are you cross-selling effectively?

Product pages are central to the eCommerce experience, and so product page UX is an area that we will pay a lot of attention to. If you have products in various sizes and/or colours, for example, we will explain how to make this customisation process as user-friendly as possible.

Even once a user has clicked “Add to Cart”, research suggests that is more likely that they won’t complete their purchase. The average cart abandonment rate is currently 69.82% and this can largely be attributed to poor shopping cart UX and checkout flow UX. Common issues include:

  • Overly-complicated form fields
  • No guest checkout
  • Inability to easily edit cart
  • Insufficient payment options
  • Lack of trust signals
  • Poorly designed CTAs

Our audit will unpick your site’s checkout experience and explain any usability issues that could be preventing your customers from clicking that all-important “Place Order”/”Complete Purchase” button! 

64% of all searches are now carried out on mobile. However, people are not simply browsing the web more on their mobile devices, they are actually making more purchases on them.   Mobile commerce currently accounts for 60% of total UK retail online sales. This means that making your eCommerce site mobile-friendly has never been so important! If a large chunk of your traffic is mobile and you are not catering for mobile users, you are missing out on an opportunity to significantly increase your sales and revenue. 

We will review your site’s mobile experience and look out for a range of mobile-specific issues that could be stifling your conversion rate. These include:

  • CTA buttons with touch target problems (are your buttons appropriately sized so that they can be easily tapped?) 
  • Difficult navigation (have you chosen the right menu for your site? Is it clear?)
  • Visual clutter (always aim for minimalism on a smaller screen!)

And much more…

Mobile friendliness is an SEO ranking factor, as well as an important UX consideration. A poor mobile experience, therefore, may not only damage your conversion rate but also your site’s ranking. The connection between UX design and SEO continues to grow stronger and yet is repeatedly overlooked by the eCommerce industry.

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Fixing Your Performance Problems

User Research

The first step is to understand your website’s current usability through various UX research techniques. For example, by analysing screen recordings and continuous heatmaps from real users on your site. How far they scroll, what they hover over, and any other interaction will reveal something to us about your site.

Web Analytics

We will also identify and analyse important pages that require in-depth investigation, including high-traffic pages (your homepage, category pages, best-selling product pages), as well as conversion-critical pages (your entire checkout funnel).

Actionable Insights

We will present our findings through clearly annotated screenshots that explain your usability problems, before providing conversion-focused solutions. We will use best-in-class examples across relevant eCommerce sites and the latest UX trends as points of reference.

Prioritisation

We will create an effort-impact matrix to illustrate which changes your business must prioritise. This should directly inform your short-term and long-term strategy. It will detail low-effort, high-impact changes for quick wins, as well as the most impactful, high-effort changes you can make. We will also provide a corresponding timeline for the required fixes.

Performance

We will define KPIs that will allow you to measure your site’s improving performance in a strategic and meaningful way. Your metrics will be tailored to your business and focus on sales and revenue, as well as customer acquisition and retention.

Post-Audit Services

You can then choose to opt into our ongoing UI & UX design services following an audit. We will keep our screen-recording software plugged into your site and all analytics programmes set up. Our experts can then supply you with monthly reports of suggested UX fixes and help you implement them.

The Process

Reach out to Us

01. Reach out to Us
Book a free 30-minute discovery call at a time that suits you to discuss a potential UX audit. This is also a chance for us to better understand your business goals and provide you with a quote.

Website Review

02. User Experience Deep-dive
Our UX experts will evaluate your site’s usability issues and start problem-solving. We will install our research tools onto your website for around 30 days to gather data around real-life user behaviour. 

Receive UX Audit

03. Receive Your UX Audit
Within 7 days, you will receive your in-depth report. We will highlight where your site is letting you down and provide actionable guidance tailored to your business. This will be the blueprint to growing your business.

Elaboration

04. Elaboration
We will then offer you a follow-up call with our UX experts to talk through our insights and recommendations. This is an opportunity to ask any further questions you may have and tap into our expertise.

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Frequently Asked Questions About Our UX Audit Services

Having worked in the eCommerce industry for over a decade, one of the most common things we see is online stores which generate traffic but do not convert it. This is also why the question “why is my conversion rate so low?” is such a popular one. What many businesses and agencies fail to realise, however, the answer to this question often lies in your site’s user experience. This is what our UX audit service will help to reveal. 

In turn, one of the main benefits of a UX audit is an improved conversion rate (satisfied customers make purchases!). By helping you create a more user-friendly eCommerce site, other benefits include:

UX research: a UX audit should always begin by understanding your customers. Are your customers frustrated by your checkout process? Do they struggle to navigate between pages? Without data that provides insight into your real-life users and answers these questions, you cannot truly make informed design decisions. The data we gather is both quantitative (e.g. using analytics programmes to decide which pages have the highest bounce rate) and qualitative (e.g. looking at screen recording sessions of customers interacting with your site). 

UX design suggestions: the next step is figuring out how to turn your visitors into buying customers. In other words, with this newfound knowledge of what makes your users tick, how can you re-design your site in a way that encourages them to make purchases? The design recommendations we provide in our audit report will contain the answer to this question.

To keep your eCommerce site engaging, you must continually stay on top of the needs of your customers and adjust to any new UX trends. That’s why we recommend getting a UX audit at least twice a year and any time after a re-design.

As a specialist eCommerce UX agency, we also offer ongoing UI/UX design services that you can opt into following an audit. As well as receiving a list of UX recommendations to improve your site’s usability every month, this means that any time you add new pages, features, or products to your site, you can be confident that it has not affected its UX.

During a UX audit, the most common user experience issues we see across our client’s websites are:

  • Overcomplicated menu navigation
  • Bad mobile experience
  • Lack of high-quality images
  • Poorly formatted content (particularly product descriptions)
  • Convoluted form fields
  • No guest checkout
  • Visually cluttered interface
  • Poorly defined product categories
  • On-site search function that produces irrelevant results

And much more…

The price of a UX audit can range anywhere from £500 to £10,000, depending on the complexity of the website, the scale of the project, and the agency you choose.

Our UX audit is very reasonably priced, starting from just £1,500+VAT! Alongside a detailed audit report supplemented by annotated visuals, our service also includes a one-to-one consultation with one of our UX experts.

A UX audit can take as long as a month or as little as a couple of days. When you use our service, your in-depth audit report will be with you in just 7 days. The swiftness of this turnaround owes to a mixture of impressive user research tools and UX specialists that have examined a countless number of eCommerce sites.

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We also offer ongoing UI/UX design services to ensure your website carries on converting visitors into buying customers following an initial audit.

Schedule a UX Consultation


Our Other Auditing Services

SEO Audits

SEO Audit

Our SEO audit will assess all aspects of your site’s on-page, off-page, and technical SEO, such as your keywords, backlinks, and page speed. We will identify the SEO issues that are stifling your site’s organic performance and provide solutions to them that are tailored to your industry. Implementing these suggestions is what will move you up the rankings.

PPC Audits

PPC Audit

Our PPC audit is your opportunity to find out whether you could be getting a better return on your ad spend. We will identify any areas of potential wastage and detail exactly how these inefficiencies can be remedied, whether that is through more granular audience segmentation or a complete revamp of your Google Shopping campaigns.