Do you need a UX audit?

Design debt and technical debt often go hand in hand, which can really throw a wrench into your team's speed. Even if you are rolling out new features quickly, you might find yourself in a tangled mess of inconsistencies, where different screens require a whole new mental model or interaction style. And things get even worse with larger products.

The overwhelming amount of entropy can make it daunting to pinpoint where to start improving the user experience, especially for teams with limited design resources. 

If you're feeling stuck about the next steps for your product, it's probably time to take a step back and assess your product from a strategic, user-centered perspective. Conducting a UX audit is the best way to gain clarity and direction.

Let's get into what UX audits are all about, and how to get started. 

What is a UX audit? 

A UX audit is a diagnostic process where you thoroughly assess the current state of your product’s user experience. 

You probably know there’s some bad UX in your product, but you don’t know how bad it is and what you should prioritize. During a UX audit, you evaluate every aspect of your product's UX, identifying issues and ranking them based on their impact on user needs. This approach gives you an overall “score” of your UX performance, helping you understand how you’re doing and where to start making improvements.

UX audits are a great level-set: they shake up your thinking, helping you break free from stale ideas and constraints that might be holding your product back. They pave the way for fresh perspectives and new possibilities for your product’s future. 

This is an example of the scoring system for a biotech company across various facets of the experience.

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You can analyze any of the following (and much more) during a UX audit:

• Interaction design
• Visual design, including consistency, visual hierarchy, and readability  
• UX heuristics
• Accessibility
• Compliance with UX best practices 
• UX patterns like search UX, navigation, information architecture, and breadcrumbs 

In your documented UX audit, you should have a clear understanding of your product, its strengths & trouble spots, and strategic insights into the next steps you should take. 

Signs your team is ready for a UX audit

Consider these factors when deciding whether you need a UX audit: 

• Age of your product: If your product has evolved over time, accumulating features gradually with different rationales, it’s a good candidate for a UX audit. 
• Size of your product: Larger products often have more intricate UX challenges and deeper features, functionability, and complexity that could benefit from an audit. 
• Amount of tech and design debt: If you have a long backlog of technical or design issues that need addressing, a UX audit can be the best place to start.

When NOT to do a UX audit
If you’re a startup with a relatively small product (for example, with just a few screens or interactions), a UX audit might be premature. At this point, you’re probably better off addressing current user issues and refining your product in real-time, rather than conducting a retroactive analysis.

UX relies on great teamwork, so you’ll want at least partial buy-in to conduct a UX audit. Here are a few signs the timing for a UX audit might be right:

🤺 Your team often debates specific design points (maybe you’ve argued about the same modal 27 times) or just feels a bit lost—whether at a sprint level or an overall product level. This likely means you’re lacking discernible design logic and a solid design system.  

🚨 The feeling of UX urgency is beginning to mount: you know you need to improve your product’s user experience but you’re not sure what to prioritize. 

🍽️ The appetite for change is there, but the direction forward isn’t clear. UX-minded people might be emerging in the organization and you want to start socializing UX, but launching right into a redesign isn’t going to fly. 

🛣️ You’re standing at a crossroads, unsure of what aspects of your product you should salvage versus what you should completely scrap. Does the whole product need rethinking, or can you design pieces and make incremental improvements? Or maybe you need to rebuild the product, and the team doesn’t want to repeat past mistakes. 

How to conduct a UX audit

You can audit your product’s user experience in-house, or work with an external company. The benefit of getting external help (from someone like us 😉) is you get that objective outside perspective, and a better understanding of the competitive landscape in user experience terms. 

At P&P, our approach to conducting a UX audit is designed for speed, high-impact outcomes, and clear, actionable next steps. The main goal is to get a baseline UX level for the product that sets the stage for improvement.

Here's how we do it: ‍

1. Define goals: We start by understanding our client’s objectives and what they hope to achieve through the UX audit. This step is crucial to refine our focus and have the highest impact on the business. ‍

2. Map "red routes": We identify critical user workflows that are essential to the user experience. This also tells us what to prioritize based on usefulness to the most users. ‍

3. Evaluation by designers: Our designers thoroughly assess the product based on our list of 200+ UX standards for enterprise software. We conduct and record individual evaluation sessions where we share our thoughts out loud via Loom. The goal is to foster independent thinking and drive as many fresh perspectives as possible from the crew.

4. Designer analysis sessions: We hold collaborative sessions to discuss findings and assign numeric grades to different aspects of the user experience. We compare the results amongst the team, and identify themes, core issues, and emerging trends.‍

5. Calculations & final determinations: After running final calculations, we align on our final design recommendations.‍

6. Prepare the report: Using our report template, we compile all our UX findings and recommendations.‍

7. Present and discuss: We present the in-depth UX audit report and discuss the findings in detail with our client’s team.‍

8. Socialize the document: We help our client share and discuss the audit report with their team to align on the proposed UX improvements.

[We’ve got your back with UX audits. Learn more about our UX audit service here.]

What do you do after completing a UX audit? 

You’ve gone through all those eight steps, hurrah! But now what? After completing a UX audit, it’s time to translate all those juicy insights into tangible improvements. Start by holding prioritization sessions with your team to decide what UX issues to address first, based on their impact and urgency. 

Then, compare your existing design debt with your product roadmap to identify overlaps and dependencies. From the items on your product roadmap, identify the “free” UX improvements, meaning what issues will be addressed organically through planned roadmap activities. Make sure to allocate design resources to areas where improvements will have the greatest impact on user experience and business outcomes. 

Finally, update your product roadmap based on the audit findings and prioritizations to include targeted UX improvements.

Wrapping up 

When you’re feeling stuck, conducting a UX audit gives your team a structured way to assess your product's current state and set the stage for meaningful improvements.

By following these steps, your UX audit will be more than just a document sitting on a (virtual) shelf—it’ll give you strategic insights into where to go next, aligned with your business goals. 

If you could use some help navigating this process, get in touch with us!