What is a UX audit, and what does it include?

A UX audit, also called a UX design audit, is a structured review of a digital product that finds where users get stuck, why conversions drop and what to fix first. Think of it as a health check for your product. The result isn't a long PDF. It's a ranked plan of fixes.

We've run UX audits on SaaS platforms, HR tools and enterprise software, including Mint66, Thymometrics and a complex yacht management platform. Each time, the audit found problems users could see but the founders couldn't.

What is a UX audit?

A UX audit reviews how easily real people can use your product, and where they struggle. In plain terms, it answers one question: does this product make sense to the people who use it? If you're new to the field, start with our guide to what UX design involves.

Typical findings include confusing onboarding, dashboards that bury the key numbers and accessibility gaps. The goal is to find the issues that block adoption, reduce retention or cost you conversions.

What does a UX audit include?

Every audit we run covers the same six parts:

1. Analytics review. Where users drop off, get stuck or hit errors, from funnels, heatmaps and session recordings if you have them.
2. Team interviews. What your support, sales and product people already know about where users struggle.
3. Usability review. A heuristic evaluation: the product checked against established usability principles, screen by screen, including whether layouts, buttons and navigation behave consistently.
4. Flow walkthrough. The main journeys, such as onboarding, dashboards and reporting, walked step by step, with every friction point annotated.
5. Accessibility check. Contrast, keyboard navigation and other gaps against WCAG, so no group of users is locked out.
6. Ranked findings. What to fix first, with the expected impact and effort for each.

In practice, this finds very specific problems. On the Mint66 SaaS portal, reporting was buried in secondary menus, and restructuring the navigation increased adoption. At Thymometrics, dense dashboards hid the key engagement metrics, and a simpler layout made them clear and helped subscriptions. On the yacht management platform, form-heavy workflows slowed crews down, and redesigned layouts cut completion times and errors.

The UX audit process, step by step

1. Set the goal. Pick the business problem the audit should explain, such as low activation or falling conversions.
2. Gather the data. Pull analytics funnels, heatmaps, session recordings and support tickets.
3. Map the key journeys. Walk through each main flow as each type of user, step by step.
4. Evaluate against heuristics. Note every issue against usability principles and accessibility guidelines.
5. Rate severity. Mark each issue high, medium or low by how much it blocks users.
6. Prioritise. Plot the fixes on an effort against impact matrix.
7. Write it up for action. Turn the findings into a report the design and development teams can work from.

How long does a UX audit take?

A focused UX audit of your main user journey takes about two weeks. Products with several user roles, platforms or modules take longer. The yacht management audit took three weeks, because we mapped workflows across crew, finance and admin roles so the fixes would work across the whole system. Either way, an audit is far faster than a redesign.

How much does a UX audit cost?

At Exline Labs, a focused audit of your main user journey starts from £800 and takes about two weeks. Products with several user roles, platforms or a large number of screens are quoted after a short call. You get a fixed price before any work starts.

Whoever you work with, three things drive the price of a UX audit:

• How many journeys it covers. One core journey, such as sign-up to first use, is the smallest audit. Every extra journey adds review and testing time.
• How many types of user there are. A product used by customers, staff and admins needs each one's journeys checked separately.
• How much data there is to work from. Analytics, heatmaps and support tickets make an audit faster and sharper. Without them, more of the work is interviews and testing.

Who should run your UX audit?

Your own team knows the product best, which is exactly why they find it hard to see what confuses a new user. An outside audit brings fresh eyes and no attachment to past decisions. If you do run it in-house, ask someone who didn't design the journeys to lead it, and test with real users rather than colleagues.

When you choose an outside team, look for three things. They should show you real findings from past audits, rather than a template. They should rate every issue by severity and effort. And they should be able to build the fixes, or hand them to your developers in a form they can use straight away.

What you get at the end of a UX audit

1. A ranked action list, ordered by impact on conversion or retention.
2. Annotated screenshots showing exactly where friction happens.
3. Design recommendations, with wireframes or mockups for the most important fixes.
4. Guidance for scaling, so the fixes carry across modules and future features.

Mint66 used its ranked plan to guide a redesign without a full rebuild. Thymometrics received dashboard wireframes its sales team could demo.

What a UX audit report should include

Many UX audit reports look polished but change nothing. They're full of screenshots, vague comments and generic advice. A useful report is a roadmap: what's wrong, why it matters and how to fix it. It should contain five things.

Heuristic findings with severity ratings. Each issue gets a rating. A broken navigation link that stops progress is high severity. A confusing button label that slows users down is medium. A missing confirmation message is low. Without ratings, everything looks equally urgent.

A user journey map with friction points marked. A visual map of how a typical user moves through the product, with problems marked where they happen. For example, onboarding drops at step three because the form asks for information users don't have yet.

Analytics findings. Evidence from funnels, heatmaps and recordings, linked to the friction it explains. For example, 40% of users leaving onboarding at the same step, or a key button nobody clicks.

Ranked recommendations. Specific fixes ordered on an effort against impact matrix. Moving a VAT field from step three to step six is low effort and high impact. Redesigning a whole dashboard is high effort and medium impact. "Fix onboarding" isn't a recommendation. "Remove these three fields" is.

Technical handoff notes. What to change, where and how, for the developers. That means naming the exact component, listing the steps to remove from a workflow and referencing the WCAG guideline behind each accessibility fix.

Once you have the report, start with the high-impact, low-effort fixes, share the technical notes with your developers and track retention and churn over the next 90 days.

Red flags in a weak report: no severity ratings, no journey map, no analytics, no ranked recommendations and no technical notes. A report missing these wastes time and money, however good it looks.

A UX audit example

Here's a UX audit sample: three findings of the kind we see in a typical B2B SaaS product, each with its fix.

UX audit checklist

Use these checks for a quick first pass on your own product:

• New users reach the main action within their first session.
• Onboarding asks only for information users have to hand.
• The main navigation shows the features people use most.
• Every page has one clear primary action.
• Buttons and links say what they do.
• Dashboards lead with the numbers users check most.
• Forms show errors next to the field, in plain words.
• Every action that changes data is confirmed.
• Text contrast meets WCAG AA.
• Everything works with a keyboard alone.
• Layouts, buttons and icons behave the same everywhere.
• Pages load quickly on a mid-range phone.
• Empty states tell users what to do next.
• Analytics track each step of the main journeys.

If more than three of these fail, a full audit is worth doing before you change anything else.

When should you get a UX audit?

• Before fundraising. Investors want evidence that users adopt your product and stay.
• Before scaling. Fixing friction early stops churn growing with your user base.
• After a major feature launch. Check that new flows don't confuse existing users.
• When metrics stall. An audit explains flat adoption, retention or conversion.
• After a redesign that didn't fix the numbers. A new look rarely fixes a structural problem.

Thymometrics commissioned its audit when subscription growth slowed. The findings led to a redesign that increased uptake.

UX audit vs usability testing: what is the difference?

A UX audit is an expert review using heuristics, data and design principles. Usability testing means watching real users try to complete tasks. An audit is faster and finds structural problems. Usability testing confirms them with real behaviour. Used together, they give you the full picture. See how to run usability testing for your startup.

Why audits matter for founders

At Mint66, the founders believed reporting was clear, but the audit showed users were lost in the menus. At Thymometrics, leadership believed the dashboards were strong, but users couldn't find the key metrics. On the yacht platform, form-heavy workflows were costing crews hours every week. Each was a conversion blocker, and fixing them improved adoption, retention and sales demos.

Book a UX audit

Our UX audit services find your biggest conversion blockers and give you a ranked plan to fix them. The people who audit your product can also redesign and rebuild it. Talk to us about a UX audit.