How to conduct a successful UX audit in 6 steps

UX audits involve looking at quantitative data—e.g. bounce rates, conversions, and clicks—to see where the user experience is lacking or deteriorating, and learning more about these trends with qualitative data from watching users explore your site or product or talking to them directly.

In other words, running effective UX audits requires you to understand both what is happening with your users and why. And that means going beyond surface-level trends to understand your users’ journeys, motivations, and pain points.

This guide gives you step-by-step instructions to perform a UX audit—plus a handy checklist to track your progress. 

We cover:

1. 6 steps to conducting a successful UX audit

2. What UX audit tools do I need?

3. UX audits in action: a case study

4. When to perform a UX audit

5. Ultimate UX audit checklist

6 steps to conducting a successful UX audit

A thorough UX audit involves a range of activities, including:

• Identifying trends in user behavior

• Observing and speaking with users to understand their experiences

• Discovering where user needs aren’t being met

• Finding bugs and design or technical issues

By effectively conducting a UX audit that takes all these activities into account, you develop deeper empathy for users and discover important opportunities for improvement. Here’s how to do it.

1. Get set up for success

Decide on your goals. With a clear objective in mind, you’ll know where to start and what data to focus on.

For example, if your goal is to improve retention, you might start by identifying which user segments are prone to churn. Then, take a closer look at the journeys individuals from those segments typically make before unsubscribing. 

Start gathering user data. Unless you’re auditing a completely new product, you’ll need to look at what users are doing in your app. At a bare minimum, you should have a traditional analytics tool like Google Analytics set up. 

Digital experience insights platforms (like Hotjar 👋) give you a deeper look at customer journeys with tools like session recordings and heatmaps, while surveys enable you to measure attitudinal metrics like customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) at key points in user journeys. (We’ll talk more about UX audit tools later.)

Get the right people involved. For larger audits, you might need collaboration from design, development, product, and marketing departments. Bring everyone together to discuss past user research learnings and project goals. 

Set an end point. There’s no real ‘end’ to a UX audit—it could, theoretically, go on forever!—so set a timeline for completing your analysis. Most UX audits take two to four weeks, but it’s usually helpful to plan out timelines that include key milestones.

Create user personas. To explore how well your product serves users, you need to understand your target audience’s goals, motivations, and pain points.

Start by creating user personas for each key audience. We recommend using the jobs-to-be-done framework to establish each persona’s desired outcomes.

Map out customer journeys. Creating customer journey maps gives you a clear overview of how your user personas move through an app and their goals at each stage.

2. Perform a screen-by-screen evaluation

Explore your product or website. Go through each of the key user flows you outlined in the last phase and experience them from a user’s perspective.

For example, walk through the steps a new user might take when signing up for a free trial and exploring your app. Do the same for a paid user who regularly engages with core features.

It’s important to be realistic here—try to explore like a ‘typical’ user rather than an ideal one.

Complete a heuristic analysis. This means assessing your app screen-by-screen based on your knowledge of UX best practices. A heuristic analysis should help you identify any glaring issues your team previously missed.

3. Look for hidden trends in user behavior

Analyze your conversion data. Where relevant to your goals, see how these metrics vary for different user personas, traffic sources, or products.

• Micro-conversions (i.e. smaller actions leading to macro conversions)

• Macro-conversions (like a user completing sign-up for a free trial)

• Sales

Be on the lookout for key trends: do any audience segments or products perform worse than you expect? Did any dips coincide with past feature launches or app updates?

Examine your web and app data. Your analytics tools will give you access to a wide range of user behavior metrics, such as:

• Bounce rate

• Exit rate

• Add-to-cart rate

• Cart abandons

• Average session duration

• Time spent on task

• Rage clicks

• U-turns

• Common paths through your site

• Traffic 

See how the data varies for different pages and audience segments, then look for discrepancies that could reveal important trends. For example:

• Analyze exit rates to find out where users commonly drop off. This may reveal pages where users typically get frustrated or confused.

• Check average session times and see if they vary across audience segments. After identifying which segments are the least engaged, you can start investigating why.

• Look at where high-value customers enter your site from. You might find that certain landing pages and site journeys correspond with users who spend more.

Check your attitudinal metrics. If you set up user surveys in phase one, now’s a great time to analyze them. Check how customer satisfaction scores or Net Promoter Scores® (NPS®) vary along the customer journey to identify places where users are struggling.

4. Find the why behind the trends

Perform usability tests. Usability testing is a way to assess the functionality of your product by watching users interact with it. It typically involves giving users a task in your app or website—for example, adding a product to a cart and completing a purchase.

Watching users complete the task can uncover usability issues and reveal how intuitive the UX design really is. 

Interview users. Speak to real users about their likes and dislikes to expose any unmet needs or unresolved pain points users struggle with when interacting with your site or app. Consider running interviews immediately after usability tests to learn more about your participants’ experiences.

Watch recordings of key user journeys. Like traditional usability testing, watching recordings reveals where users get lost, confused, or distracted. 

With an advanced session recordings tool like Hotjar Recordings, you can also view recordings of users who performed specific actions—like unsubscribing or abandoning their shopping cart—and compare journeys of users who converted or purchased against those who did not.

5. Analyze your data

Identify issues. Go through your data and note any problems—from glaring, urgent issues to minor ones.

• Did you notice any significant (or repeated) criticisms from the people you interviewed?

• Did your usability tests or recordings reveal parts of your app that confuse or frustrate users? 

• Do users intuitively understand how to navigate your site or product?

• Did you observe any bugs or errors in your user interface (UI)?

• Did your heuristic analysis reveal significant areas where you’re not meeting UX best practices?

• Do users’ experience of your product match their expectations?

Rank issues by urgency. Put each issue you found into categories ranging from ‘critical’ to ‘low priority,’ according to how much they affect the user experience (and your end goal).

Create hypotheses for UX improvements. Improving UX isn’t just about solving issues—it’s also about finding new ways to meet user needs. Based on your interviews, what else do your users need?

6. Share your findings

Create a UX audit report. It won’t be necessary to include every small detail of the audit—but make sure colleagues can clearly see why you make the recommendations you do. 

• Set the context for the report by clarifying the goals of the UX audit

• Summarize the data you gathered, and any valuable findings

• Share the list of ranked issues you previously created

• Make actionable recommendations for improvements, fixes, and future additions

Include links to important data. Give your colleagues a chance to explore critical data themselves, where relevant (and practical). It’s much easier to get buy-in from colleagues when they see for themselves what customers are doing and saying.

What UX audit tools do I need?

There are tons of UX audit tools available today, but these are our top picks (and to make things even sweeter, they all sync together).

Traditional analytics: Google Analytics

Google Analytics is essential for gathering much of the quantitative data you need to identify trends. Use it to create reports on conversions, browsing metrics, and typical user journeys through your website.

Behavior analytics: Hotjar

Hotjar complements your analytics data by showing you the why behind user trends. With Recordings and Heatmaps, you learn more about what users do on their journeys. What’s more, Surveys and Feedback let you gather qualitative data to understand user perspectives better.

Finally, Hotjar Engage helps you recruit participants for interviews, then host, record, and transcribe your calls.

(Did you know? You can also integrate Google Analytics with Hotjar to unlock new capabilities, like filtering your Recordings data by traffic source.)

Product analytics: Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a product analytics tool for software and apps providing much of the quantitative data you need to spot trends in user behavior. 

For example, Mixpanel lets you track metrics like daily active users and churn rate, with advanced segmenting options. You can also use Mixpanel to track how often users interact with specific elements, like your search bar or call-to-action (CTA) buttons.

With Hotjar’s Mixpanel integration, you can filter Hotjar Recordings, Heatmaps, Trends, Funnels, and Dashboard data by specific Mixpanel events. 

When to perform a UX audit

For most businesses, these are the key moments where UX audits are useful:

• When you’re experiencing a lull in sales, conversions, or user engagement: UX audits help you pinpoint the ‘leaks’ in your most important key performance indicators (KPIs)

• When you’re preparing to launch a minimum viable product (MVP): UX audits help you identify any issues ahead of time, so your launch goes off without a hitch

• Anytime you need a general health check on an existing product: even when your app is performing well, UX audits can uncover user pain points and needs

Ultimate UX audit checklist

Download our comprehensive UX audit checklist (pictured below) to start checking off your steps.

Gather the right data to get useful insights from UX audits

UX design audits are all about developing deeper empathy for your users. By seeing your app or website through their eyes, you’re able to fix issues and get a deeper understanding of what different user personas need. 

But when your ultimate goal is to understand your users, you need to gather, analyze, and share the right data. Be sure to equip your team with UX audit advanced tools, like Hotjar, so you can effectively investigate user journeys. With the right data at your fingertips, you’ll answer your most pressing UX questions—and make improvements that move the needle.