Experience audits that tell you exactly what to fix first

Why audit before you redesign

When a product or website underperforms, the instinct is to redesign. That instinct skips the step that decides whether the redesign will work: understanding exactly what is broken, why, and what matters most. Without it, teams often ship a better-looking version of the same problems.

An experience audit is a focused diagnostic. It combines several lenses - usability principles, analytics, user journeys, competitors and accessibility - to answer three questions:

1. Where are users struggling or dropping off?
2. Why is it happening?
3. What should we fix first, given impact and effort?

The output is not a long list of generic best practices. It is a short, evidence-backed, prioritised plan, with each finding tied to a specific page, flow, persona or component.

What the numbers say about friction

Small frictions add up to large losses. Baymard Institute's aggregation of 50 studies puts the average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate at 70.22%, and estimates that a large e-commerce site can gain a 35.26% increase in conversion rate through better checkout design alone. B2B journeys are longer and more collective: Forrester reports that 86% of B2B purchases stall during the buying process. And attention is short everywhere - users often leave pages within 10-20 seconds unless value is clear.

The detail matters for B2B too: several of the top reasons - unexpected costs, forced account creation, complicated forms, errors and lack of trust - are design problems that apply equally to quote requests, trial sign-ups and application forms.

Audits for different kinds of product

What makes an audit useful

• Specific, not generic. Every finding points to a page, flow or component, with evidence.
• Prioritised. Impact and effort for every finding, so the team knows what to do on Monday.
• Honest about uncertainty. Where evidence is thin, the recommendation is to test, not to assume.
• Integrated. Accessibility, content and technical issues sit in the same list, not separate reports.
• Short. A summary leaders can read in minutes, with detail behind it for the team.