A content designer’s guide to product audits
How to set yourself up for success with the right scope, goals, and tools
Much like taking a space walk, performing a content audit can be exciting, overwhelming, and a little scary. Who knows what content complexities and usability meteors you’ll encounter in the nooks and crannies of your product’s terrain? You might even be going where no content designer has gone before — moonwalking your way through a dusty, dated workflow from your pre-style guide era.
The good news is that, like a space walk, a content audit is much less intimidating when you’re well prepared. The more work you put in up front, the smoother your audit will go. So before you slip on that space helmet and start taking screenshots, follow these tips from my Button 2022 conference talk to set yourself up for a successful content audit.
1. Find your stakeholders
Every good astronaut has a top-notch ground control team in place before takeoff. If you try to go it alone, you could find yourself lost in space with a giant list of product improvements and no way to implement them. That’s why starting an audit by identifying your major stakeholders is key. You can always add to this list later, but here’s who you’ll likely start with:
Product & UX
Find the product managers, UX designers, UX researchers, and content designers currently responsible for the area or feature you’re auditing. They’ll be the ones you’ll partner with to translate your audit findings into product improvements, so it’s vital to keep them involved.
In some cases, it may be helpful to identify people who worked on the product previously. Try reaching out to them to learn historical context, or ask if they’d be okay with fielding ad hoc questions.
Engineering
Try to find at least one engineer or engineering manager who can help with technical questions during your audit. You can also work with this engineer later on to size and scope findings into tickets for the backlog.
Marketing
You might want to involve someone from the marketing team if your audit area overlaps with acquisition activities, such as a product landing page, app store page, or a create account flow.
They’ll likely have valuable feedback on voice and tone as well as aligning product copy and design with marketing assets and campaigns.
2. Set goals
Space missions are expensive — and so are content audits. They’re time-intensive and create work outside of just content design. To avoid burning your precious mental rocket fuel without making actual product improvements, it’s important to set goals that are realistic to the resources your team can devote to auditing and fixing issues.
Suggested goals
To increase your chances of mission success, try focusing your audit on a specific feature or flow with a concrete goal in mind, like:
- Improve an underperforming metric
- Address or reduce specific customer complaints
- Remove outdated content and/or improve cross-feature content consistency
- Build a backlog of general UX improvements to address in the future
Avoid goal traps
Watch out for goals that are too broad, too vague, or too narrowly focused on fixing surface-level microcopy issues without acknowledging that there may be bigger UX or engineering issues at play.
Here are two common “goal traps” to avoid when stakeholders are requesting an audit (based on real-life failed audit missions).
Goal trap 1: Roll out a new voice to an entire product at once
This is an unrealistic goal unless teams can devote the necessary resources to achieve this and tie to a specific ROI measurement.
How to reframe: Identify high-impact areas to audit first. Start with one area and then expand as time and resources allow.
Goal trap 2: We didn’t have a content designer when we built this, and we want to get some “fresh eyes” on the content
It’s great that your team is excited about having a content designer, but you should always ask: What resources will be available for implementing improvements? Often, there’s an expectation that you’ll simply point out surface-level copy issues with no plan or support for addressing underlying UX issues. The impact will be limited and may not be worth the time invested in the audit.
How to reframe: Identify UX opportunities and inconsistencies and devote the necessary UX, product management, and engineering resources to fixing them.
Or instead of an in-depth audit, you can just create an overview of common content issues in the product and discuss how to better approach these as a team during future projects.
3. Define your scope
On your space walk, are you going to photograph every inch of your product planet, or are you going to zoom in on a few problem areas? Since scope can make or break an audit, you should define your parameters before you set foot off the ship.
If your scope is too large, you risk overextending your timeline. And you may end up with an unmanageable list of issues that makes prioritization an overwhelming — if not impossible — task. To start, try picking a product area that one person can audit within one week, maximum. Any bigger, and you could risk getting overwhelmed.
Why one person? Involving multiple people in your first audit can be tricky unless you are all committed to cataloging things the same way. If you’d like to break up a bigger audit scope amongst a team of people, try having one person pilot this approach on a few smaller areas to nail down the documentation process and then teach it to others.
Once you’ve defined an area to audit, think about setting additional parameters around devices and content states. Every parameter you add increases the time your audit will take, so consider scope impacts carefully.
Devices:
- Will your audit cover desktop, mobile phones, tablets, or all three?
- Which operating systems will you include?
- If you’re including multiple devices and/or operating systems, how will you document issues that occur on multiple platforms?
States:
- Will your audit include error states or just happy paths?
- Will your audit cover harder-to-capture microcopy (behind form field menus and tooltips, for example)? Or just stick to the surface?
4. Share the plan
By now you’re itching to put on your space suit and start walking through your product, but first you should take time to document what you decided in steps 2 and 3 and share it with the stakeholders you identified in step 1.
Feel free to use a doc, a deck, or whatever format works for you. It will pay off to have this artifact to refer to later!
5. Build your audit toolbox
You’re almost ready to launch your audit mission. But first, you need to have the right tools for the job.
Screenshot tools
Feel free to use your device’s native screenshot tool, but here are additional apps that can make the process easier (all are free unless otherwise noted with $).
Desktop screenshots:
- Application: Snagit ($)
- Application: Greenshot (free on windows)
- Browser-based: Nimbus
- Browser-based: Awesome Screenshot
Mobile video recordings
Recording yourself walking through an audit area on mobile allows you to capture screenshots later on desktop, which can save a lot of time. Share the video to your desktop using Airdrop, Slack, Google drive, or Snapdrop.
- iOS: Record it!
- Android: Xrecorder
Organizing screenshots:
Audit spreadsheet
Pick an audit spreadsheet template that best fits your needs — like this one for example — and add or subtract columns depending on your needs. Remember: every audit is different, and no template is one-size-fits-all.
Log each issue on its own line. This way, you can easily filter by issue type, product area, and priority so you can quickly sort issues and identify trends.
Ready to blast off?
Hopefully by now you’re feeling ready to take your first small steps (or giant leap) into your product content audit. All of the prep work you put in up front ensures you can now focus on the mission at hand: identifying content and usability issues that you’ll soon transform into real product improvements.
For more content audit tips, check out my 2022 UX Camp talk: Don’t Fear the Spreadsheet: A Guide to Content Audits for Product Teams.
