What it is
An audit is a professional appraisal of your product aimed at identifying problems and proposing fixes. It generally focuses on solutions that preserve the product rather than advocating for a complete redesign, although an ethical professional will let you know if the product is beyond saving.
There are three main kinds of audit that I offer:
A heuristic audit is a study of your product's user experience. It involves mapping out all the pages, screens, and functions, and testing them thoroughly to find usability problems.
An analytics audit is a study of your product's metrics, using things like Google Analytics or Hotjar, in order to compare the product's performance against competition or other benchmarks. It looks for deviations from expected performance to identify aspects of your product that are overperforming or underperforming.
A roadmap audit is a study of your company's future plans, whether at the strategic level (using ProductBoard or Aha!) or the tactical (such as Jira tickets) to ensure that priorities make sense, and that the org's resources are being used to build the best possible product.
All audits will result in a detailed report. For best results, the different types of audit can work together.
Why you want it
Your product has more UX issues than you know
Hard truth: your product probably is absolutely crawling with usability bugs. I would know. I have audited dozens of products, including those from big-budget enterprise companies, and they all have UX issues that are bad enough to cause real-world problems for users. A typical audit turns up at least 100 real UX issues for a startup-sized product. More established products (especially those built with a Scrum methodology) have far more.
Full redesigns are expensive
You may be avoiding the prospect of a redesign of your product because you realize it's going to cost you a lot. The full product process takes a lot of time and man-hours. You might not have the budget, or you expect to sunset the product in the foreseeable future, so a redesign would be a waste. But that does not mean that you should neglect your product's usability entirely.
Audits focus on fixes that will produce a lot of value for little expenditure. Many of them would take less than an hour of development time.
Audits let you validate your own team
Another benefit of a third-party audit is that they allow you to assess the performance of your product team. Once you review your audit report, you can begin to identify where these UX issues originated. This can help you identify opportunities for training, organizational restructuring, or improved processes.
What I do
To ensure that your audit is thorough, I use my own proprietary software, XenBuild, to map out your product in detail. You will have full access to the audit report in XenBuild. This format will allow you to more easily navigate the report than if it were a linear list. But, if you like, it can be exported to SVG, Figma format as a visual, and XLSX as a spreadsheet.
How to get started
Getting an audit is as simple as giving me access to your software, including paid/upgraded accounts, and admin privileges if applicable. If your product has functionality that relies on things out of my control, like events that only occur at certain time intervals, I recommend giving me the ability to trigger these states in order to test them.
After I deliver the audit report, I can help you prioritize the fixes and fit them into your project management structure, such as adding them to sprints.
I also recommend having me audit your product analytics to identify problem areas and correlate them to UX issues. I can then monitor the analytics to see if the KPIs improve.
Book a call to kick things off.