A UX audit is a structured evaluation of a digital product to identify usability issues and areas for improvement, based on expert review and UX principles. We use hundreds of hours of first-hand research with customers, as well as best practices, to evaluate the app, site, or prototype.

Audits

Independent expert evaulations of apps, sites, and services

Book an audit

Expert UX evaluation

A comprehensive expert evaluation of your experience against usability best practice, accessibility standards, and real-world expectations based on thousands of hours of usability testing.

Includes

Review of key journeys and screens
Usability issues ranked by severity and business impact
Customer value proposition and trust heuristics (usually excluded from other UX audits)
Accessibility review against WCAG principles (where relevant)
Clear, actionable recommendations

Get an expert evaluation

Competitor evaluation

Understand how your experience stacks up and where competitors are quietly winning. It’s not just feature comparison, we focus on experience patterns, friction, and positioning. It’s designed to inform strategic decisions, not copy competitors.

Publicly-accessible competitor audit

For websites or apps without login barriers
We apply a UX audit lens across competitors and compare them to your experience

Authenticated competitor experience

For banking, insurance, or account-based products that live behind a login
Requires recruiting customers who actively use those services and allow us to review their personal accounts
Combines expert review with real customer interaction

Get competitor evaluation

Healthforce

Kena Health

Ideal when you need to…

Get clear direction quickly, based on best-practice heuristics and expert review
Identify easily missed friction points, prioritised by impact rather than opinion
Create alignment across stakeholders on what to fix first
Check an experience where usage is healthy but conversion isn’t

Audits don’t replace…

Deep generative research to uncover unmet needs and motivations
Usability testing for nuanced issues affecting specific cohorts or edge cases
Behavioural insight from real customers over time

Our audit heuristics

We have used many different guidelines, best practices, and heuristics over the years including Nielsen’s 10 Usability heuristics for user interface design, The Baymard Institute’s 500+ e-commerce guidelines, Google’s MasterfulMobile heuristics. We have also facilitated hundreds of hours of first-hand research into real customer behaviour across many different industries. With all of this knowledge, we have created our own 50 heuristics that we believe impact customer behaviour.

They are grouped into these 6 areas:

Value proposition, comprehension & trust

Will customers actually understand what you offer? How clear is your USP, and is there enough to keep a user there?

Navigation

Is your information structured in a way that a user knows where they are at any point and knows how to easily navigate to another area of your app?

Learnability & affordance

Does your design allow for cognitive biases and how well does it leverage behaviour change techniques to help users take action?

Mobile & responsiveness

Is your product intuitive and responsive? Following known interface conventions across many different screen sizes to not punish a user for the device they have.

UI design

Is there good use of the Gestalt Principles in the visual design and does it tie in with the tone of the brand?

Findability & choice architecture

How easy is it to search, iterate on searches and find appropriate pages or products?

Accessibility & inclusion

How well does your product follow international WCAG 2 accessibility guidelines?

Want to know more? Let’s chat

Audit questions

What is a UX Audit?

A UX audit is a systematic expert evaluation of a digital product, such as a website, app, or prototype. It’s designed to uncover usability problems, possible friction points, and areas where the experience might not align with user expectations.

For our UX audit, we analyse each page of a flow, looking for basic UX and accessibility issues, such as “do clickable elements look clickable?” but also comprehension and value proposition issues, such as “what is this page telling its customers?” and “what is the motivation to a user to take action?”

The goal is to provide actionable recommendations that help teams improve usability, increase conversion, and reduce frustration. At How Might We, we use UX audits as a strategic tool to guide better design decisions and prioritise fixes that will have the biggest impact on users.

When is a UX audit helpful?

A UX audit is most helpful when you need quick feedback on which big issues might be holding back your product’s user experience, but don’t yet have the time or budget for in-depth user research. It’s particularly useful before a redesign (to avoid carrying over problems), after launch (to identify quick wins), or when user feedback or analytics point to issues with task completion or conversion.

Whether your product is live or still in development, a UX audit can provide targeted insight into what’s working, what’s not, and where to focus design improvements for maximum value.

Can I use AI for a UX audit?

Yes and no. AI tools are excellent for spotting accessibility issues or comparing UI elements against documented best practices extremely quickly. We actually recommend running an AI UX audit before adding the human element to pick up any big, obvious issues. At the moment, however, AI tools lack the contextual judgment and empathy that a human brings. It’s very hard for an AI to imagine how a human will interpret what the digital product is saying or asking for.

Strategic UX insight requires understanding business goals, interpreting user behaviour, and knowing when to break or bend “best practices.” That’s where experienced researchers still make all the difference.

What heuristics are used for UX audits?

We have developed 50 heuristics covering Learnability and affordance, Accessibility and inclusion, UI design, Responsiveness, Navigation and feedback, Value proposition, comprehension, and trust. These heuristics result from combining Nielsen’s 10 usability principles, Baymard’s e-commerce guidelines, Google’s mobile e-commerce heuristics, and hundreds of hours of one-on-one usability tests with real customers.

We will happy share our heuristics list with you if you want more detail. Contact us

Get expert feedback quickly

Let's chat