Why and How to Audit Your Digital Product/s
In the UI/UX domain, having access to technical, quantitative statistics is great. These statistics help to provide a window into a product’s performance. However, buyer beware — technical/quantitative statistics can also be addictive!
As a product owner you are probably already familiar with the urge to regularly check your product performance statistics and analytics (even though you likely already checked just this morning or the day before). You are aware that nothing completely new is likely to have emerged within hours, but curiosity and care drive you back to your statistics dashboard anyway.
Qualitative user data and insights are more difficult to obtain, however they are just as important. Without both types of data you can never fully understand the complete picture.
While quantitative data shows you the WHAT, importantly, qualitative user data shows you the WHY. We recommend periodically assessing how a product is performing for its users. Questions like:
- Does your product still solve their initial problem as intended?
- Since your last check in, have users been exposed to newer competitive solutions that offer features your product is missing?
- Are there any usability issues that are now easier to detect with a larger returned user base?
Key to robust UX & Design audits is a close look at the product from three lenses:
- The customer experience lens: to assess alignment between product values and consumer aspirations, levels of trust in the brand and product, and overall enjoyment interacting with the product and service.
- The user experience lens: which will assess product experience performance related to usability, effectiveness, and comprehension.
- The expert lens: which assesses best practices and industry standards with respect to usability, visual communication, and accessibility.
Product owners use the insights from such assessment to:
- obtain a complete picture of product performance,
- identify areas for improvement,
- prioritize improvement backlogs, and
- utilize user-based evidence to secure resources for product improvement, expansion, and promotion.
Stay tuned for our next article where we discuss examples from an insurance product UX and Design Audit.
In the meantime, we invite you to reach out to us if you have questions or need support to methodically gather qualitative data and generate user driven insights through periodic UX & Design Audits.
