Did you decide to conduct the UX audit? Congratulations! You’re really serious about your business. Many SaaS entrepreneurs realize the importance of a seamless user experience for business growth. However, significant time and money spent make most of them keep this thought laying on the shelf.
I wouldn’t say that the UX audit, if being appropriately done, is a no-brainer. I know what I’m talking about, at Eleken design agency, we provide UX audit services for SaaS companies. The good news is there are a few online UX testing tools you can use during your audit and benefit from them. In this article, we’ve prepared a list of UX tracking and analytics tools that proved to be helpful and insightful.
1. Google Analytics
Using Google Analytics for the UX audit may seem a bit of an unexpected solution. This tool typically comes to mind when we’re talking about market research and the digital marketing area. Yet Google Analytics can efficiently serve as a UX analytics tool, providing you with valuable insights regarding your website visitors, which you can utilize for user experience improvement.
Conversion is the most important indicator of website performance, and it’s not a secret that a great user experience has the power to make people take expected actions - leave their contact data, subscribe for a newsletter, or purchase. Based on various metrics, you will be able to better understand your audience’s behavior from the first minute they land on your website. For example, Google Analytics data will tell you where your potential customers come from and how long they usually stay on your landing page.
Behavior reports help you answer the questions:
- How many unique visitors visited your website?
- What were those CTAs customers reacted to?
- Which page performed the best in terms of customer engagement?
Data like demographics, interests, locations, languages, and devices let you adjust your user flow, CTAs, and overall UI. Our designers know that even the smallest detail in a page design can be a turning point leading either to checkout or to leaving a site.
By understanding users’ behavior, you can enhance a customer journey and ultimately lead more people to conversion.
As for mobile devices, Google offers mobile app analytics for Firebase that provides insights on mobile application use and customer engagement, being a good tool for UX audit.
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2. Mixpanel
Unlike Google Analytics that tracks website visitors and is great to have a general understanding of traffic, Mixpanel is focused on actions users take on your webpage. This tool helps receive answers to questions like “how many users pushed the CTA button from the pricing page,” for example. The results may hit designers upon an idea of what needs to be changed in UX to improve conversion.
However, Mixpanel insights may be too one-sided, being based mostly on UX researchers’ assumptions. Thus, it would be more effective to compare Mixpanel with other analytical tools data to reach unbiased conclusions.
3. Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics is one of the most expensive web analytics tools, but it is definitely worth every penny. The tool offers robust analytics and customer behavior reports that help UX designers better understand customers and improve user experience.
The Kissmetrics functionality allows to:
- Find out what features customers use the most
- See key business metrics (churn rate, MRR, subscriptions, new trial starts)
- Identify the most viewed webpages
- Track the best customers and cohorts behavior
- Discover weak points in the onboarding funnel
Being not as detailed as Mixpanel but undoubtedly more profound than Google Analytics, Kissmetrics provides an effective mix of raw and interpreted data. Just press the “Analyze customers behavior” button and get insights helpful for your design audit.
4. HotJar
If you want to understand what people are doing on your website and what elements and information attract them the most, you can have a sneaky peek at their behavior. Nothing illegal, just a smart digital tool! Hotjar creates interactive heat maps of users’ clicks, scrolls, and moves to give you an idea of how users interact with your website.
Hotjar’s line-up consists of four products: heat maps, session recordings, surveys, and real-time feedback pools. However, heat maps are the product Hotjar is mainly associated with. The “heat” is a color scale highlighting the most popular “hot” webpage areas with red color and the least interacted or “cold” - with blue color.
Click maps show which CTAs users click the most. Also, you can find out that some non-CTA UI elements attract more attention and draw users away from taking expected actions. Being aware of these nuances, you’d probably decide to rearrange important buttons to improve user experience and increase conversion.
Scroll maps show how deep to the bottom of the page your website visitors usually go. If users don’t scroll down, it means they can miss some information you want them to know.
Move maps track mouse movements without clicking or scrolling. It can tell us what information a user finds interesting to check on your webpage.
Hotjar has a decent competitor with even more robust functionality to facilitate the UX audit.
5. Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg offers five reports analyzing users’ behavior from different sides. There are no chances something will remain hidden after Crazy Egg’s behavioral analysis.
Heatmap report highlights with different colors the most and least popular areas of your webpage. You can track whether the area where you place your CTA button falls into users’ attention.
Scrollmap report shows how far to the page bottom your website visitors go. If you think about putting your important CTA button somewhere close to a footer, you’d probably change your mind looking at the report’s results.
A lovely Confetti report displays each user’s clicks instead of a total number of clicks. You can create 22 customer profiles to have deeper insights into how each customer segment is performing.
Overlay report filters clicks by various criteria like new and returning visitors, device type, UTM campaign.
List report shows you the percentage of users who clicked on each clickable element on the webpage.
With the help of CrazyEgg UX testing, you can get a comprehensive picture of users’ interaction with your website and think about customer journey enhancement.
6. UXCam
“UXCam is the market leader in app experience analytics, empowering mobile teams with fast, contextual, and high-fidelity insights,” - states UXCam on the official website, and we have nothing to object to. This tool does have excellent capabilities for app analytics. Session recordings, heat maps, crash logs, and even integration with Firebase, a Google platform for creating mobile and web applications, makes UXCam a great addition to your UX audit toolkit.
Here is what UXCam can help you with:
- Record, analyze, and share sessions and events to identify if there are any users’ behavior patterns
- Track screen flow to overview how users interact with your app and what frictions they have
- Create heat maps to find out whether users encounter complication while using an app
- Log app crashes and UI bugs to communicate the issues to the product team to make necessary adjustments for the next app releases
The last tool in our list seems to be the greatest one as not figures, but real people tell you the truth.
7. UserTesting
UserTesting is not a conventional review site. It’s a platform where you can get prompt customer feedback on websites, mobile apps, and prototypes user experience.
You receive audio and video messages from your target audience once they will test your product and accomplish another task you assigned to them. Also, it’s possible to schedule live conversations, put questions, and get insightful answers with the help of which you can:
- Сheck market feedback on your design decisions before the product development stage
- Detect the bottleneck in user experience that causes frictions when using your product
- Make clear your customers’ needs
Small startups and large enterprises like Facebook and Grammarly are among UserTesting clients, so you can be sure it’s worth trying this tool for your UX audit.
Professional UX audit services by Eleken design agency
While conducting a UX audit independently using online tools can provide valuable insights, sometimes you need a more comprehensive analysis to uncover deeper issues. Plus, tools can't guide you on what to do next with your findings. We at Eleken can. We help our clients not only identify areas for improvement but also give actionable recommendations on possible solutions.
Here’s what our UX audit process looks like:
1. Thorough product evaluation. We start by thoroughly understanding your product and business, putting ourselves in the shoes of your customers, interviewing your team, and analyzing user feedback.
2. Page-by-page audit. Using Jakob Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics, we evaluate each page of your product, identifying issues in architecture, navigation, forms, usability, accessibility, and visual style.
3. Comprehensive report. We organize our insights into a structured report, categorizing issues by severity and providing annotated screenshots with clear recommendations for solutions.
4. Results presentation. We arrange a Zoom meeting to present the audit findings, explain each problem area, provide recommendations, and discuss further redesign plans.
To sum up, we at Eleken have profound experience in doing UX audits for our clients working with various tools. Drop us a line if you ever need our assistance. Also, learn how to conduct a UX audit in our next article.
