Enhance Your SaaS User Experience: Commission a UX Audit

The Software as a Service (SaaS) industry is growing extremely rapidly, at around 20% year-on-year. Estimates say that the SaaS sector will grow to be worth over $150 billion over the next five years. It’s an exciting industry to be in — a combination of always-connected devices, innovative technology, and solutions to real problems makes it an exciting way to attract customers and generate serious profit.

The SaaS marketplace is becoming incredibly competitive, and if you want to stand out and be successful you need to provide a truly exceptional customer experience. Every aspect of your app matters — the problem it solves, how it looks, branding, ease-of-use, speed, availability, and much more.

With so much choice, the user experience (UX) is absolutely critical. If you want to get visibility and traction in the marketplace with apps that users will come back to again and again, you need to stand apart. One way to do that is by commissioning a UX audit. We’ll explore why you might want to do that, what’s involved, benefits, what a UX audit will look at, and next steps.

Why You need a UX Audit for Your SaaS Application

The main drivers for commissioning a UX audit are:

• Too much “friction” in your app will put off users and stop them using your SaaS product.

• If your app doesn’t meet their needs, it’s going to be very difficult to get them to continue using it. You never get a second chance to make a first impression.

• App users have never had more choice — there are lots of competitors and similar apps out there, that’s true whether they’re a consumer, B2B user, or enterprise client.

• App users are very demanding in what they want from an app.

• Users will make a decision on whether they like your app within a minute of using it.

Getting a UX audit gives you a strong competitive advantage combined with hard data, recommendations, and methods to enhance your app so it has the widest possible appeal.

Why You Shouldn’t Complete a UX Audit Yourself

You might be tempted to complete a UX audit in-house. While it’s certainly important to get opinions from developers, designers, business users, and your community of testers, they don’t tell the whole story. Using a UX professional gives you several advantages:

• They will provide a completely objective view of what can be improved to enhance the user experience.

• They have worked on many other smart device and web-based apps so can contrast and compare.

• A UX expert understands what works well — they have exposure across industries, understand user needs, and have years of experience with how people use these tools.

• They can benchmark various aspects of your app against industry standards and best practices.

• They can bring in external testers, experts, and others to help define and refine any issues.

• A practiced User Experience professional will be able to arrive at actionable insights on a much shorter timeline than an in house team.

Who Benefits from Carrying Out a UX Audit

Although UX audits can help anyone developing SaaS products or complex websites, they are especially helpful to certain types of business:

• Technical startups wanting to develop a minimum viable product for testing.

• Businesses without internal design, UX, or testing teams.

• Organizations wanting to expand their app offerings who are developing different iterations of apps.

• Agile project developers to ensure UX enhancements are in line with user needs.

The Benefits You’ll Get From Commissioning a UX Audit

Commissioning a UX audit provides several possible benefits to you, your business, and your team:

• An objective report on every aspect of the user experience, based on real-world use of your app.

• A UX professional will give you insight into your app allowing you to make rapid changes that really benefit the end user.

• Feedback on using your SaaS product across multiple devices and use-case scenarios.

• Clear, actionable direction for further design and development work to improve UX.

• Base future improvements on hard data and analytics rather than guesses or hunches.

• Advice on making your UX a pleasure to use including speed, responsiveness, navigation, and more.

• Advice on additional metrics and feedback you can collect to align future improvements with user needs.

• Some UX auditors can also provide external design, development, and technical expertise to help you enhance the app further.

• A well-designed app will help you win more signups, strengthen the app’s reputation, and reduce user churn.

Ultimately a UX audit is designed to help you improve the end product you’re providing to customers. That means something that’s simple and easy-to-use, that gives the end user what they need, and is something they are prepared to pay for and recommend to their friends and colleagues.

Areas a UX Audit Will Examine

Your auditor will use a variety of approaches, tools, metrics, and comparisons to analyze every aspect of your SaaS product. This includes:

• Understanding what your business goals are and what you want to get out of the product.

• Exploring your business strategy and development plans for the product.

• Understanding your typical user including their persona, needs, and desires.

• Establishing the specific problem your digital products solves and how it does that.

• Reviewing any existing user stories and feedback.

• Analyzing existing metrics for how people use the application.

• Reviewing customer support data for any issues with using the application.

• Looking at interfaces and user flow — how users actually navigate through and interact with every part of the app.

• Reviewing the app against best practice and industry standards around responsiveness, usability, navigation, clarity in design, branding, and more.

Preparing for a UX Audit

If you want to commission a UX audit, you will need to get several things in place.

• Choose a company with expertise in complete UX audits for SaaS products. 

• A clear idea of the business goals and metrics you want to reach.

• Examples of your typical users and user intent.

• Any metrics or feedback you’ve gathered from users.

• Design and development plans for the app (current and future).

• The resources you can assign to help complete the UX audit.

If your SaaS product isn’t performing as well as you want it to, it’s time to bring in a professional UX auditing company. They can give you the feedback, reporting, experience, expertise and recommendations you need. This will help your application stand out, attract users, and contribute to your business goals and strategy.