According to Forbes Advisor, users form an opinion about a website in 0.05 seconds. The rule “don’t judge the book by its cover” doesn’t apply to digital products (websites and apps) for business.
A website or app is the first touchpoint for users in most businesses, and if you fail to make that first impression successful, you have little chance of retaining that customer/user.
So, if you’re thinking, “Huh, who’s gonna notice a few tweaks in the design?” or “Let’s focus on the business; we’ll deal with the website or app issues later,” then let us enlighten you. You’re highly mistaken.
Is your website (or app) not getting enough visitors, even though it’s freshly designed? Have you incorporated some new features but didn’t get the desired results? Are the users adding the products to the cart but leaving before checkout? If the answer to these questions is a big YES, then a design audit is probably the only thing that can save your business.
One design fails here, and another won’t seem like a big deal, but when you conduct a design audit, and all inconsistencies lie before you to solve, it’s much more systematic. Let’s enlighten you about a thing or two about Design Auditing and how it can improve your business revenue by leaps and bounds.
What is a Design Audit?
How do you ensure that your design is appropriate at different times?
How do you align your business’s digital presence with its objectives and users’ expectations?
The answer to these questions is “DESIGN AUDIT”.
Design Audits spotlight what matters and what doesn’t, what needs to be changed and what needs to stay, what needs to be added and what needs to be subtracted from the design.
It looks for visual elements, consistency, usability/accessibility issues, content/messaging effectiveness and overall design. Design auditors consider the most detailed elements and scrutinise every bit of the platform based on user research, competitor analysis, market standards, and brand persona.
The goal of the design audit is to improve user efficiency. It’s a continuous, ever-evolving process. No design is perfect, but try to look at this fact with a silver lining: If something is not perfect, there’s always scope for improvement, and improvement gets you business.
When Should Businesses Conduct Design Audits?
When should you opt for a design audit, though? There isn’t a universally accepted timeline for conducting design audits, but some factors must be considered.
Answer the following questions to yourself. If the answers indicate that your UX needs an audit, then you should do one.
- Have you recently launched new features and redesign?
- Have you launched any new updates, services, or products for your business?
- Do you see a drop in the retention or conversion rates?
- Are you getting continuous negative user feedback for UX?
- How long has it been since you started something new in your business? Did you give it some time and have sufficient data to examine it?
- Is your branding outdated and requires revamping?
- Is the content and visual identity inconsistent?
- Has the analyst informed you of higher bounce rates?
Conduct a design audit during these critical activities to chart the growth and failures of new beginnings.
When a business is launched and the website is created for the first time, it travels places from there. While welcoming the new elements and features, there’s a high chance that the designers may forget your brand voice and veer off in different directions.
These are the situations when you perform design audits to make your brand image a universal whole again as your organisation matures.
Why a Design Audit is Important for Your Business?
A design audit may seem like an extra effort but it has many benefits. This section mentions some of them.
Improved User Experience
An efficient design audit leads to a better user experience, which, in turn, improves your business overall. When users find the site easy to navigate, they are more likely to sign up for a newsletter, buy a product, book a service, leave better reviews or whatever your CTA is.
Regular edits are needed as time passes, users’ expectations and needs change, and an outdated design product will eventually disappoint. Maintaining those edits and monitoring the results and design audits are crucial.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
A business’s Conversion Rate can be improved by performing a design audit and experiencing a website or app from the customer’s point of view. Any areas of improvement, such as overly complicated features, that are barriers to conversion should be considered and audited. Confusing navigation and vague calls to action prevent users from completing a specific task.
User journey analysis is one of the numerous ways to increase CRO by analysing how users navigate your website. Funnel tracking is unavoidable for noticing customers’ pain points and understanding where the drop-off lies.
Brand Credibility and Trust Building
A design audit should ensure your brand sustains credibility and builds user trust. Your brand’s messaging shouldn’t stray away from the original intent that you started with. A brand that feels consistent and looks reliable to the audience brings results.
Understand customers’ perceptions of the brand and its short-term and long-term goals so that its objectives align well with customers’ expectations. A brand should keep up with market trends and give it an edge over competitors.
Cost Efficiency
Many business owners don’t perform design auditing because they consider it an extra cost. It may come as a surprise, but design audits are not expensive. They save a lot of money in the long run and generate more revenue.
When done after a usability test before the product launch, a design audit can help identify shortcomings in the design product. Knowing this information beforehand allows designers to look for remedial measures to reduce development costs.
Staying Competitive
Design audits are a proven way to stay ahead of the competition because some businesses still don’t understand the importance of design audits. Hence, they continue to use an age-old design product. If you are among the companies that understand that evolution is part of progress, then you will be able to beat your competitors.
The UI/UX field continually evolves, and technical advancements are constantly released. Organisations should incorporate the latest design developments in their design practices.
Increased Customer Loyalty
If the product is well-designed and engaging, customers will return to use it, which will help build a loyal customer base. A cohesive design that provides a coherent user experience should not be undermined.
Apps and websites are the face of the business. If users dislike engaging with them, it creates friction in the buying process. It’s unlikely that they will invest in the business, even if it’s good.
Improved Market Position
Improving the UI and UX of a digital product can improve a business’s market position. If a product outshines its competitors, it holds a higher market share. A design audit also adjusts the business to accommodate future developments and growth, which saves time.
Sustained ROI
Treat the cost of a design audit as an investment, and the return you will get will be much higher than that. Actions like signing up, purchasing, or updating software should be smoothened while auditing UX.
When users feel satiated with the digital process, they return for the product and suggest others do the same. Word-of-mouth marketing for a well-interactive design brings a high Return on Investment (ROI).
What Do We Do in Design Audits?
But what exactly do designers look for in design audits, and what elements and factors do they consider? Let’s understand.
Analyse UX and UI
Design audits of any product consist mainly of UI and UX.
UX, or user experience, focuses on how users interact with the product and whether they encounter any friction in the overall experience. It also includes how they navigate, engage with, and feel the product.
Possible issues in UX: During the UX Audit, issues that may resurface include poor navigation, unclear instructions, slow responsiveness, etc.
As the name suggests, UI, or User interface, focuses on a product’s visual and functional design. An excellent UI is intuitive, functional, and aesthetically pleasing and follows design principles and brand guidelines.
Possible issues in UI: UI audits can solve issues like inconsistent interfaces in typography, colour schemes, and visual hierarchy.
UI and UX may seem like totally different things, but usually, the website is audited for both as part of a broader audit for optimal user experience.
Look Out for Objective and Key Results (OKR)
Everybody starts a business with objectives and results they want to achieve. But after you’ve started your business and are a few months or years in it, how do you know if you’ve achieved your objectives?
Design audits can help you measure success periodically and set new objectives. While performing audits, one can determine whether the current design can generate the conversions a business needs to achieve its OKRs. What good is a design if it cannot attract business and deliver measurable value?
Keeping OKRs in check motivates employees to achieve higher performance. It provides transparency and data-driven tracking.
If the OKRs are not being met, designers and stakeholders must determine how design auditing can help achieve the targets.
Keep Brand Consistency in Check
Consider your brand as a student with consistent behaviour, personality, and performance. But if the student stops showing excellence in any of these aspects, then it’s your job as a teacher to ensure they stay on the right track. A design audit works as a teacher.
All brands and businesses are known for a few elements, such as logos, fonts, colour palettes, messaging, visual style, product range, principles, etc. Design audits ensure the brand doesn’t veer from its identity, which existing customers/users recognise.
During design audit sessions, designers make sure that consistency is maintained at all touchpoints of a brand.
Maintain Accessibility and Inclusivity
Accessibility and inclusivity should be at the heart of your UX design. If your product lacks these qualities, design audits should be the opportunity to correct those mistakes.
The Web Accessibility Initiative‘s reports stated that nearly 15% of the world’s population has a recognised disability. Digital products should accommodate the needs of users with disabilities and follow the accessibility guidelines offered by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
When user testing is done, it should include people with different abilities to gain insights. A few practical actions can be taken, including
- Using high-contrast colour schemes.
- Avoid using colour as the only way to convey information.
- Using visibly clear fonts and incorporating Alt text, subtitles, and captions for images and videos.
These steps will serve the needs of users with visual, auditory, motor, or cognitive impairments and help brands dodge some lawsuits and fines.
Responsive Design
A Hubspot article said that 53.8% of web designers believe that unresponsive design is the first and foremost reason for a design audit.
We have electronic devices of different sizes, such as phones, tablets, laptops, and PCs, but when you visit a website, the interface is still compatible with each screen. Why and how is that even possible? Do developers write different code for different for the single website? The answer is No. A single code is written and is applied for all devices, and it makes the app or website responsive to all screen sizes.
Most people use apps and websites on their mobile devices. At the end of 2021, 54.4% of global website traffic came from mobile phones. Hence, it has become even more critical to audit mobile apps.
Deliver a smooth experience across all touchpoints by incorporating the following considerations in a design audit,
- Navigating a digital product should not be rocket science; it should be intuitive and easy to use.
- Loading time should not frustrate users; excess use of poorly designed animations can lead to high loading time.
- Images and multimedia should be compatible with different screen sizes.
Content Audit
A design audit without a content audit is useless. A content audit includes reviewing text, images, effectivity of the CTAs, and multimedia on the website or app and optimising them according to requirements, relevance, and accessibility.
Content includes text on website pages, app screens, product descriptions, error messages, CTAs, user guides, and FAQs. Keep your messaging brief, clear, and consistent.
Ensure the text caters to people speaking different languages. The language should be jargon-free and understood by ordinary people. A professional UX Writer should write the content and data to improve SEO and easily guide users through their tasks.
Tools to Use:
To make the process easy, use Figma and Frontitude. Content King is another tool that tracks content and shows real-time SEO.
Technical Aspects
Many miscellaneous technical aspects that play a pivotal role when ranking websites should be taken into account during design audit, such as,
- Identifying performance bottlenecks, optimising code, compressing images, and implementing caching result in faster page loading.
- The positioning of pages on the website, the information structure, and the content architecture all make a website look organised. Google crawls through the website, and if the index is not up to par, it doesn’t rank the website on the SERP page.
- Issues like broken links, plagiarised content, weak security features and inaccessible pages result in lower user satisfaction.
Five Easy Steps to Conduct a Design Audit
Professional designers follow some rules and steps while auditing a design process. Below are the five crucial steps.
Step 1: Goal Setting
Before beginning the task of design auditing, decide the extent to which you would like to go, the objectives for it, and the success metrics you will use to measure once you complete the audit. These goals could include:
- Increasing conversions
- Identifying UX bottlenecks
- Improving user experience
- Strengthening brand identity
Goal setting is essential so your audit project doesn’t spiral into something huge.
Step 2: Gathering Data
To make advancements in design, you must know the metrics of your current design. Observe key performance indicators (KPIs) to understand what users’ expectations you cannot meet with the current design.
Data sheds light on areas for improvement and where the website or app needs work. Data that you can consider gathering include,
- No. of visitors to the website
- Number of users that sign up for the app
- Retention time
- Pages that get the most and least attention
- Bounce rate
- Points of friction in the user journey
- User map journey
- Click-through rates
Tools to Use:
- Google Analytics, Hotjar, Crazy Egg, and Hubspot help you gain insights into data methods like surveys and interviews.
- The data can be qualitative or quantitative and gathered from heatmaps and usability tests.
Step 3: Auditing Visuals and Functionality
Once you’ve dealt with data and numbers, you can focus on the website’s visuals and functionality. A visual design should be appealing and cohesive and translate the message to the audience.
Some components of visual design that should align with the brand voice are,
- Layout
- Colours
- Typography
- Images
- Logos
- Icons
- Formatting
- Input boxes
Components of functionality include,
- Navigation structure
- The functionality of different features, such as forms and buttons.
- Accessibility for users with different abilities.
Tools to Use:
- WAVE is a tool that tells designers how functional a website is.
- BrowserStack tests whether the product design is accessible for different devices and browsers.
- Figma and Sketch can be used to create and review a design blueprint.
Step 4: Competitor Analysis
Keep the competitors’ design as a parameter to judge yours; it will help you understand what is trending in the market. However, if all your competitors follow the same templates, don’t hesitate to make innovations. Identify gaps that you can fill through your product design.
Step 5: Implementing and Reporting
After you’ve noticed what you need to work on, start by implementing every element. Try to make all the elements as simple as possible so that even a layman can understand what the app or website is guiding them to do. Chuck that complex pricing chart out of the window and incorporate a simple way to explain the same thing.
After you’re done implementing, start by reporting all the steps you have taken in the audit and run the report through stakeholders or other concerned authorities.
The report should include,
- Areas you’ve improved
- Priority tasks
- Actionable recommendations
- Roadmap you followed
- Your reasoning behind the recommendations
Deciding to Conduct an Audit?
Performing a design audit is not a one-time task; it’s a repetitive process that needs to be performed occasionally. To ensure the business stays afloat, a constant cycle of testing and iteration should be in place. Keep auditing and creating new prototypes based on customer feedback.
There’s no better time to audit your website than now. Contact us at Yellow Slice to learn where your design lacks. We can make it shine even brighter so that your business boosts.
FAQs On Design Audit and its Impact on Business
1. How do you carry out a design audit?
Design audits include steps such as setting objectives and goals, gathering performance data, enhancing visuals and functionality, performing a competitor analysis, and eventually implementing all the steps you think are necessary.
2. What tools help conduct a web design audit?
Design audits can’t be fulfilled without using some tools to test where your website lacks. Some useful tools you can use may include,
- Feedback Widgets help you evaluate how your website looks visually to users.
- Google’s very own PageSpeed Insights enlightens you on how your design performs on different devices regarding page speed.
GTmetrix or Pingdom gives detailed descriptions of different metrics regarding website performance.
