Case Study: The Answer Store — How we increased conversions by over 3%

A UX audit remains one of the go-to solutions to improve a product’s user experience. If your business, product or app is not functioning the way it should or isn’t attracting the right audience, the problem may lie in the user experience provided. A UX audit goes through the entire process of understanding your users, your business, the user experience being provided and potential problem areas, to come up with actionable recommendations that can enhance your user experience.

We conducted a UX Audit for The Answer Store, an Australian startup creating a range of thoughtful lifestyle products that expertly blend natural ingredients with cutting-edge technology. Their website was receiving good traffic, but the conversion rates were average (at about 1.5%). Our UX audit thus aimed to investigate the cause and help us devise an action plan that would further boost their business.

Understanding Business Goals

• Understanding what the client wants from their business is the initial step of a UX audit. Business objectives must be clearly defined. The best way for this is to conduct stakeholder interviews.
• We conducted stakeholder interviews with the management team at The Answer and learnt that their main business goal was to increase the conversion rate.
• Through this, our goal was set — optimising the website to attract new customers while also fixing UX problems that were driving away existing customers.

Understanding The Users

• Users being the driving force behind any business, we needed to understand their perspective. Knowing what they expect from the business was crucial to realize what we should offer. User personas, and user interviews, were the chosen ways to go.

A User Persona representation of one of our end-users

• Post interviews, or post creating personas, affinity mapping provided us with a great way to sort the data gathered into clusters. This made it easier to understand what our users were thinking and want to achieve and helped us identify potential problem areas and opportunities.

Affinity Map created based on our user interviews

Understanding User Objectives

• To further understand where our users might encounter difficulties or head down the wrong path. We turned towards Google Analytics, user flow data.
• The user flow data greatly helped us in how people navigate through our website and gave us information on ways to improve navigation. We got great insights on which pages and campaigns performed the best. Further, we also used user flows to understand where exactly our users were dropping off.

Reviewing Analytics Data

• Statistical and numerical data being invaluable during a UX audit, we tracked the businesses Google Analytics and Hotjar performance. This data provided us with in-depth information on user interactions, including drop-off rates, time spent, and conversion rates.
• We analyzed bounce rates, exit rates, drop off rates, and time spent for every page of the website, to understand which products were doing good, where were we losing customers, and how we could improve the UX to retain them.

Google Analytic Snapshots

• We also reviewed data from Hotjar Analytics, which provided heatmaps and recordings, to know exactly how users were interacting with our website. With the help of click and scroll heatmaps, we could see user behaviour and identify design issues that were causing users to drop off, which provided additional opportunities for improvement.

Analysing Click Rates and Scroll Percentages

Reviewing Usability

• Accomplishing tasks from the user’s point of view helps designers better understand the challenges faced by the user. Performing a run-through of the product, and working with an exhaustive task list can help pinpoint usability issues. Taking notes, detailing pain points and screenshots are some of the ways you can document the process.
• It also helps to base this process on established criteria, such as Jakob Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics, and you can also call this particular stage the heuristic evaluation stage. For The Answer, we considered the 5 types of users most e-commerce sites encounter:

Image Credits: Creatim

• We did a run-through for the entire website, replicating the user flow of buying a product, and noted details about the challenges we faced along the way. Reviewing the website as an end-user let us identify many potential opportunities that could help attract more customers, and also identify pain points that were causing users to leave the process midway.
• Apart from reviewing from an end-user perspective, accessibility reviews are also a great way to find improvement areas. By performing an accessibility review using Google Lighthouse, we found performance issues that were slowing down the speed of the website, a pain point we did not encounter while performing the heuristic evaluations.
• Technical reviews can also be useful to identify technical challenges. Aspects like speed, search engine optimization, and best industry practices can often be a key factor for sub-optimal performance. By performing a technical review for The Answer using Google Lighthouse, we identified several JavaScript issues that were slowing down the website. There were also snippets of dead code which Lighthouse detected. Thus, a combination of heuristic evaluations, accessibility and technical reviews, provides a complete review from a user-centred as well as a technical standpoint.

Snapshot of Google Lighthouse accessibility and technical review for The Answer

Compiling Findings

• Once we completed all the steps and gathered data, it was now time to compile the findings and come up with recommendations for the client. Segregating and grouping data into logical blocks, helped us analyze insights.

A compilation of some of the issues highlighted via Usability Reviews

Making Recommendations

• The final step of the UX audit was to provide the client with recommendations. Recommendations were drafted in the form of clear actions that can help the client achieve their business goals, and improve the user experience for customers. A variety of methods including storyboards, wireframes, prototypes, and simple documents with steps underlined through text, were the ways we used to communicate our recommendations to the client.
• For The Answer, we created a document detailing the various opportunities that would help increase conversions. Some were design recommendations, some were additional functionalities that could be added, and some were enhancements to the existing design.

Some of the recommendations made to THE ANSWER team

This step marked the end of our UX Audit. However, post the UX Audit, we redesigned the website by implementing some of the recommendations. The steps we followed to address the problem areas and maximise on the opportunities will be detailed in my next article, on Website Redesign. Thanks for reading and stay tuned.