A UX audit of a small business website does not need an agency. It needs a list of the things a visitor comes to do, a phone, an honest hour, and a way to write findings down so they turn into fixes rather than opinions. This page sets out how to do a UX audit in six steps, and how to conduct a UX audit so that the findings are tied to tasks and principles rather than taste. Most UX audits done in-house stop after the third step, with a list of things that annoyed the person doing it; the last three steps are what make it an audit.
Steps one to three: tasks, the walk, the notes
One: write down the three to five things a visitor comes to do, in their words: find out what it costs, book an appointment, see if you cover my town, get a quote. Two: on a phone, as if you had never seen the site, do each one, starting from a search result rather than the home page, and do not use anything you know. Three: every time you hesitate, scroll looking for something, tap the wrong thing, retype a field, or give up, write it down with a screenshot and the task you were on. That list is raw findings, and it is where most in-house audits stop.
Steps four and five: the principles and the priority
Four: against each finding, name the usability principle it breaks, using the ten heuristics that expert reviews have used for decades: the site does not show what is happening, uses words visitors do not, makes an error easy to make, hides something the visitor has to remember, and so on. Naming the principle turns an annoyance into a defect someone else can agree with. Five: score each finding by how many visitors hit it and how badly it interrupts the task, and sort. The top five are the audit; the rest are a backlog.
Step six: fix, and record what changed
Six: for each of the top findings, decide the fix, who does it and when, and record it against the finding. After the fixes, walk the same tasks again and note what improved. That record, the tasks, the findings with their screenshots and principles, the fixes and the re-walk, is the audit, and it is worth keeping because the next redesign starts from it. It is also the shape of the audit record Stagenix keeps against a site, so the findings do not live in a screenshot folder nobody opens.
Questions people ask about how to do a ux audit
Can I audit my own site or do I need a stranger?
You can do the structured version yourself, but a stranger with a phone finds in five minutes what you have stopped seeing. Do both: the stranger's walk first, then your own six steps.
How many tasks should the audit cover?
Three to five. The ones that lead to money: price, booking, enquiry, coverage, purchase. Auditing every page is a content audit, which is a different exercise.
How often should UX audits be repeated?
After every significant change to the site, and once a year regardless. The six steps take an afternoon on a small site.