A UX audit is a structured expert review that finds where users struggle and why. What it includes, how long it takes, and how Studio Yapa runs one.
A UX audit is a structured review of your product by an experienced designer, measured against usability principles, analytics and your business goals. The output is a prioritised list of the problems costing you users, with evidence for each one and a recommended fix. At Studio Yapa, a product design studio in London, we run audits as a fixed scope engagement, usually completed within two weeks.
It is the highest leverage two weeks most product teams can buy, because it turns a vague worry into a ranked plan your team can act on the following Monday.
What does a UX audit actually include?
A proper audit combines three kinds of evidence, not just opinion:
- Heuristic review. Every core flow walked by a senior designer against established usability principles, recorded screen by screen.
- Analytics review. Funnel data, drop off points and rage clicks, so findings are weighted by how many users each problem touches.
- Context review. Your goals, your support tickets and your onboarding emails, because many UX problems live outside the interface.
Each finding gets a severity, an effort estimate and a recommendation. The result reads like a repair manual, not an essay.
An opinion says the page feels confusing. An audit says step three loses 40% of new users and shows you why.
When should you get a UX audit?
The timing signals are reliable. Get an audit when:
- Signups are healthy but activation or retention is flat.
- Support keeps answering the same questions about the same screens.
- The team is planning a redesign and cannot agree what is actually broken.
- A new feature shipped and the metric it targeted did not move.
- You have inherited a product and need a map before you change anything.
The best time is before a redesign, while real usage data exists to learn from. Audits feed on evidence, and the earlier you have it, the less rework you pay for later.
How Studio Yapa runs a UX audit
Our audits are run by the senior designers who would design the fixes, not handed to a junior team. You get direct time with them throughout: a kickoff to agree the metric that matters, a working session midway, and a walkthrough of the findings with the people who found them.
We work in three steps:
- Agree the metric. Before we look at a single screen, we agree the number the audit has to explain, whether that is activation, click throughs or support volume.
- Gather evidence. Heuristic walkthroughs across desktop and mobile, your analytics and session recordings, and interviews or user tests where the question needs them.
- Rank and hand over. Every finding is scored by severity and effort, then grouped into quick wins, structural fixes and open questions, so your roadmap writes itself.
For Smart Energy GB, the audit came before any redesign. It surfaced thirty core issues across brand, UX, UI and conversion, weighted by real behaviour from Hotjar and their own dashboards. The redesign that followed went through eighty user tests across desktop and mobile, old site against new, and every issue the audit raised was solved.
What happens after the audit?
The findings split into three lanes. Quick wins your own team can ship in days. Structural fixes that need design work. And strategic questions that deserve research before anyone touches the interface.
You keep the full board either way. Many clients go on to ask us to design and ship the fixes with the same team that ran the audit, which means no ramp up, no second briefing and no findings lost in a handover.
Common questions
How long does a UX audit take? Ten working days for most products. Large multi platform products can take three weeks.
How much does a UX audit cost? Every audit is quoted to the size of your product and the question it needs to answer. You get a fixed price and a fixed timeline before any work starts.
Who actually does the audit? A dedicated senior team focused on your product alone for the length of the audit. The people you meet on the first call are the people doing the work.
Do you need access to our analytics? It helps a lot. Findings backed by your own funnel data are harder to argue with internally.
Is an audit worth it before a full redesign? Especially then. It tells you which parts of the product are earning their keep, so the redesign does not throw away what already works.
A UX audit is the fastest way to replace opinions with a plan. If your metrics are telling you something is wrong but not where, book a discovery call with Studio Yapa and we will show you exactly where to start.