You can’t just hope that your UX is up to par with user expectations. You need to proactively audit your product’s UX weekly, monthly, or quarterly.
UX audits can help you discover...
Usability issues (struggles that users face with your product or site)
Accessibility concerns
Design inconsistencies
App or website performance problems
Off-brand content or experiences
Issues with mobile responsiveness
Ways to optimize user flows
Confusing visual hierarchies
Conversion optimization opportunities
Competitor strengths and weaknesses
But you need the right software to make it easy to uncover these insights, keep track of them, and prioritize your next actions.
In this guide, we dive into the top UX audit tools across a variety of categories like heuristic evaluation tools, user feedback tools, session recorders, heatmaps, product analytics, and customer support data.
We also offer a list of the most popular UX audit methods so you can be sure you’re covering all of your bases.
How to do a UX audit
Many UX success stories begin with a thorough audit. A UX audit removes assumptions and allows you to really review your product or website design so you can uncover issues that frustrate users, fix bugs, and continuously optimize the design for the smoothest user flows.
Follow these essential UX audit steps:
Determine your criteria for a quality experience
Collect quantitative and qualitative data (see research methods below)
Validate and organize the data
Review trends
Format and present your recommendations
To conduct a thorough UX audit, combine at least 3 of these research methods:
Usability testing - Set up usability tests with users, ask them to complete certain tasks, and watch as they use your product. Take notes when they seem confused, frustrated, or take a long time to complete a task.
User session recordings - Dive into user session recordings for an important area of your product. If you discover low conversion rates, review usage of the product areas that lead to a conversion.
User interviews - Interview your users and ask them about their favorite and least favorite features, what areas of the product they struggle with, and what they want to be improved.
Heuristic evaluations - Review your product according to 10 usability criteria, providing a score for each item. Check out these examples of heuristic evaluations.
Competitor UX research - You should also dive into your competitors’ UX. You can run heuristic evaluations on your top 3 to 10 competitors.
New target user testing - Run usability tests with new target users. This is especially important when your target user is changing, such as when you are going for a new vertical or moving upmarket.
Website analytics research - Review the analytics of your website or web app to discover key metrics like conversions, user flow completions, and funnel stage drop-offs.
Product analytics research - Product analytics data is essential for UX audits of mobile apps and SaaS platforms. You can benchmark conversion and goal completion rates. Any dips will alert you to uncover the “why” behind the issue.
Customer support trends data - Check out automated insights and reports from your customer support platform to uncover trends and common complaints.
Bug and issue reports - Review reports from your QA testers and customers to find major UX problems that need immediate fixes.
Check out our full guide on how to conduct a ux audit for a step-by-step process. Review our list UX design principles for more best practices.
The types of UX audit tools you need
Make sure to have UX audit tools that cover all of these essential features:
Product or website analytics - You’ll want a platform for collecting quantitative product usage data and tracking key metrics like conversion rates and user flow completion rates.
User feedback - A user feedback platform can help you collect UX issue reports, UX feedback, and feature feedback.
Customer support analytics - You’ll also want a great customer support tool to help you audit recent support conversations and discover UX issues and trends.
User session recordings and heatmaps - As part of your UX audit process, you should also have a platform that offers both session recordings and heatmaps. These tools provide more context to product data, helping you uncover the story behind your analytics.
Below we dive into tool options across all of these categories. Many platforms overlap and offer multiple features.
15 best UX audit tools
Mix and match these UX audit tools to run comprehensive UX analyses.
We’ve got a list of top features for each tool so you can be sure you’ve got all the important bases covered.
1. UserReport
UserReport is a popular tool for UX designers and product managers. You can use it to collect user feedback, survey responses, and bug reports. This is helpful for identifying UX issues that need to be fixed, as well as product improvements.
Features:
Survey widget
Feedback widget
Net promoter score
User satisfaction score
User demographics data
User bug reports
2. Google Analytics
Google Analytics offers free website analytics. The platform offers some quick and easy insights into traffic volume and traffic sources. You can also set up conversion goals to help you track the number of users who convert into paying customers. Knowing your benchmark conversion rate is helpful for discovering UX issues. If that rate suddenly drops, that’s a sign there’s a problem. You can also set up UX A/B tests and review results as part of your audit process.
Features:
Real-time reporting
Acquisition reports
Engagement reports
Audience insights
Traffic source tracking
Conversion tracking
Mobile app analytics
Custom dashboards
3. Mixpanel
Mixpanel is the most popular product analytics platform for SaaS companies. It can be very helpful during UX audits, because you can review top-performing features, less popular features, funnel conversion rates, user flow completion rates, and more. It’s great for collecting data on all of your users, identifying UX trends, and testing UX updates.
Features:
Product analytics
User data infrastructure
APIs
Integrations with data platforms
4. Fullstory
Fullstory is similar to Mixpanel, but it’s more frequently used by consumer brands. You can track your digital experience, identify root UX issues and opportunities for improvement, and understand how users navigate across your website. You can discover drop-off issues, optimize user flows, and benchmark key metrics.
Features:
Product analytics
Qualitative insights
Integrated data ecosystem
Advanced segmentation
Mobile app analytics
5. Maze
Maze is a comprehensive user research platform for UX designers. You can manage every aspect of user research, from user recruitment to test management and automated test insights. The platform can be used for usability tests, idea validation, and UX copy tests.
Features:
Prototype testing
Live website testing
Feedback surveys
Interview testing
In-app prompts to request test participation
Test participant management
Automated reports
6. Hotjar
With Hotjar, you get heatmaps and session recordings that help add context to whatever you might discover in your product analytics data. Heatmaps are great for finding drop-off on a page and seeing what buttons and elements get the least interaction. You can watch session recordings to see how users really interact with your UX. When you see users struggle to find the next step in the user flow, then you know you’ve found room for improvement. Or, when you find a page or feature with a lot of negative emoji reactions, that’s your sign to find out what’s wrong with your UX.
Features:
Heatmaps
Session recordings
User feedback
Surveys
1:1 user testing interviews
Funnel optimization
High-level user data dashboard
7. Mouseflow
Mouseflow is very similar to Hotjar. One of the stand-out features is the user feedback collection, which can be triggered upon rage clicks to get input from users when they’re the most frustrated. You can also review session replays and heatmaps to discover UX issues like confusing layouts, missing information, etc.
Features:
Session replays
Heatmaps
Conversion funnel optimization
Form optimization
User feedback
Automated friction scores to discover UX frustrations
8. Heap
Heap is a digital insights platform that offers a breadth of product analytics. You can use it to review session replays, come up with UX tests, check conversion rates and drop-off changes, and continuously optimize your UX.
Features:
Session replays
Heatmaps
Journey maps (to compare product paths to the same conversion goal)
Data science for automated insights into drop-off
User segmenting
Customizable dashboards
Plug-and-play UX and onboarding playbooks
9. Pendo
With Pendo, you get a lot of UX audit tools in one place. You can collect quantitative feedback via product analytics and qualitative feedback with user idea collection and idea validation. The idea validation feature allows you to come up with one to three product ideas, target the right users, and request their feedback on your idea. This way you’re not just passively waiting for ideas from users, but you can get their input on the UX improvement ideas you already have.
Features:
Product analytics
In-app announcements
User feedback
Product roadmaps
Mobile and web app user onboarding
Idea validation
10. Intercom
Intercom is a popular solution for customer support. As such, it offers a lot of insight into UX issues. You can review the automated reports to discover trends with your customer support. You can also review live chat and chatbot transcripts to find common UX blunders that are frustrating your users.
Features:
Product tours
Onboarding checklists
Tooltips
Surveys
In-app announcements
AI help desk
AI support chatbot
Customer support reporting
Email
SMS
11. UXCam
Designed specifically for mobile app analytics, UXCam helps developers understand mobile user behavior and improve engagement and conversions. The platform offers a comprehensive suite of tools, including product metrics, conversion tracking, session recordings, heatmaps, and an SDK to manage bugs and crash reports.
Features:
Dashboards with automated reporting
Funnel and drop-off analytics
User journey and user flow analytics
Event and goal analytics
User segmentation
Session recordings
Heatmaps
SDK for issue reporting and analytics
12. UserTesting
With UserTesting, you can target specific users, ask them to perform specific tasks, and then watch session recordings to see how they use your website or product. You can learn from these session recordings through visualizations, transcripts, metrics, and automated insights and analyses.
Features:
User targeting
Access to the UserTesting Contributor Network (if you don’t have your own audience yet)
User testing requests
Session recordings
Automated session transcripts
Session metrics
Automated session insights
Integrations with Slack, Jira, Trello, and more
13. Capian
Capian is a dedicated UI/UX audit tool that makes it easier to take notes as you conduct a manual UX audit. While you review the UX of your website, web app, or mobile app, Capian is there to help you capture screenshots, categorize and filter them, take notes, and annotate your screenshots. You can assign screenshots to different projects and features, helping you see which area of your product has the most UX issues. This tool is great for wrangling your notes from heuristic evaluations of your product as well as your competitors’ products.
Features:
Browser extension for capturing UX issues as you audit
Issue annotations and edits
Issue categorization and filtering
Team collaboration
Automated issue insights and reports
Jira integration
Github integration
14. Frill
Frill is a customer feedback tool that’s perfect for SaaS companies, app developers, and other digital businesses. You can use it to collect product feedback like feature requests, feature improvements, and bugs. Users can submit ideas, upvote each other’s ideas, comment on ideas, and review your roadmap to see what updates you have planned. This platform is great for reviewing struggles that users have with your current UX.
Features:
User feedback board
Feature upvoting
Public roadmap
New feature announcements
Emoji reactions on announcements
SSO for users
Idea submission web app widget
15. CrazyEgg
With CrazyEgg, you can improve the UX of your website or web app. CrazyEgg offers a full suite of tools to collect both qualitative and quantitative feedback. You can run A/B tests for different UX versions. The platform also offers CTA widgets like pop-ups and banners to help you optimize conversions and test what works.
Features:
Heatmaps
Session recordings
A/B testing
Traffic analytics
Errors tracking
Surveys
Goal tracking
Pop-ups, buttons, and banners
Want to win and retain more customers with excellent UX? Explore our product strategy and design services.
