How a UX audit can help you convert

If you feel like you’ve tried everything, it may be a good point to consider a UX audit.

UX audits can serve to prove (or disprove) assumptions, map user journeys, benchmark against your market and competitors, and employ heuristics (more on this later) to give you a 360° view of the successes, pain points and opportunities around your UX. In short, it serves to put you back in control of the things you can control when it comes to crafting a user experience that converts.

The Challenge

At the point of the audit, GB Bank cited strong metrics for their onboarding process, which allowed customers to open a savings account within just 5 minutes. However, with strong digital-first competition in the financial market, GB Bank wanted to ensure their onboarding was not only fast and fuss-free, but best-in-class. They also wanted to test their assumptions by qualifying feedback from real users to ensure the onboarding process was optimised for their user demographics and particular niche of the banking market.

The Approach

1. Business analysis workshop
2. Competitor analysis
3. Heuristic evaluation
4. User testing in Shout’s UX Lab

We kicked off with a business analysis workshop, with the aim of defining goals and a shared vision of success.

Using the thoughts and ideas that surfaced in the workshop, we initiated competitor analysis.  We Benchmarked activities, including user journey flow mapping, features, and product selection. This information was distilled into a SWOT analysis to clearly outline the findings.

We then performed a heuristic evaluation of the Portal to highlight any performance, UX and accessibility issues that customers may be experiencing. This involved evaluating the UI against a set of established usability principles, known as heuristics, as well as Shout’s own Design Principles. Outcomes from our evaluation were documented and given an impact/effort priority rating.

With the theory in place, we moved on to test our findings in practice, with real users at our in-house UX Lab. Volunteers from GB Bank’s own customer base, alongside non-customers who met GB Bank’s target demographics, were invited to complete the onboarding process and answer questions based on our assumptions. Our lab uses state-of-the-art eye tracking software and the sessions were live-streamed to a separate room, where GB Bank representatives were given the unique opportunity to observe users interacting with the platform firsthand. Findings were then assessed and consolidated to demonstrate commonalities between the users, share targeted feedback, and rate the experience overall.

The Outcome

Our in-lab sessions validated some of our main hypotheses from the audit, whilst also surfacing previously unknown issues. 

 This gave GB Bank a clear rationale for future investment and a defined roadmap for UX improvement. Outcomes from real users not only provided credible feedback on the product itself, but also offered invaluable broader insight into the minds of their customers, their motivations and how they interact with the platform.

We consolidated our findings into tiered improvement packages, which scaled in effort according to good / better / best outcomes.  Armed with our recommendations, GB Bank can choose to implement the changes themselves, or work with Shout’s delivery team to augment their in-house capability.

In Summary

If you’re struggling with conversion, or simply want to improve an already performant solution, a UX audit is a comprehensive path to uncover evidence-based findings and to roadmap actionable outcomes, which can drive tangible change across your platform and your conversion KPIs.