Design Audits: Adding One More Hat to the Product Design Haberdashery

Maybe you’re thinking “What the heck is a design audit?”. For most people, hearing the word ‘audit’ typically evokes a string of cusses aimed at the IRS. But in product design, audits are something we welcome with open arms!

At Livefront, we hug design audits tight and hold them close because they’re a crucial tool in our holistic design process. We give a damn about creating kick-ass digital products, and our attention to detail and design-forward approach are paramount to creating them; it’s one of the things people love about Livefront! A design audit is a necessary tool that helps us maintain that attention to detail.

What’s a design audit?

In our workflows, design and engineering collaborate closely all the way through the launch and delivery of a product. That means the design team still has a role to play even after our pretty little pictures have been converted to 1s and 0s. A design audit is a step in the development process, prior to public launch, when a designer compares the original designs of the app to the almost-complete development build, down to the pixel. It’s one final box we check off to ensure that the designs have been properly implemented before shipping off to the wild.

Why do design audits rock?

Design audits help cap off the engineering work with a final check and approval from the design team to be sure that the app has been rendered beautifully. Some of the benefits include, but are not limited to:

• Helping us catch any deviations between design and implementation
• Keeping the design and engineering processes closely integrated
• Ensuring our pixel-perfect designs are brought to life as intended
• Keeping our eyes (and ears… accessibility FTW!) sharp, maintaining an extreme attention to detail
• Making all of our app dreams come true

What goes into a design audit?

There are a few important aspects that go into conducting a successful design audit.

We need to audit all relevant platforms (typically both iOS and Android). We want to check that the platforms have been engineered as intended, that there is feature parity between platforms, and that there aren’t any errant discrepancies from the designs for either platform.

The primary function of the audit is to analyze our apps with a high degree of scrutiny and rigor. A designer will begin by performing various levels of testing to be certain that the features and animations perform according to the design intent. Then, each and every screen in the app will be even more closely examined using visual tooling to measure the app against the design comps. We want to verify that proper spacing, font size, and color values have been implemented everywhere, down to the exact pixel.

Occasionally, we may update a font or color style in Figma that hasn’t yet been propagated in the implementation, like a button that’s the wrong color. That’s an item for the design audit! Or sometimes a headline may appear slightly too high on the screen, and we want to let engineers know that it should be moved down 10px. That’s another item for the design audit! We continue documenting instances like this until we have a comprehensive list of visual updates to make.

At this point, most designers would call it a day and be done. But we’re not most designers, and we’re not finished yet! In addition to the base designs and features, we also audit dark mode and landscape orientation, as well as various accessibility and compatibility components such as dynamic text resizing, voice narration, and testing on various screen sizes. At Livefront, these are all aspects that are considered and accounted for in our apps from Day 1, and we want to be sure that everything is included in the final delivery of the product.

Though a lot of this work is captured and managed by QA in our iterative review processes, we’ve found a lot of value in keeping designers involved throughout product development. Not only does it help our friends in engineering and QA, but we designers feel more ownership and excitement seeing our work all the way through!

Ship It!

Finally, our app is ready for launch, and the design team can sleep soundly at night. I hope I’ve made it abundantly clear how important design auditing is to our process; it’s no small feat to go through our apps with this level of scrutiny, but it’s oh-so-worth it. Now what are you waiting for?! Go get auditing your own apps!

Chris is a designer at Livefront where nothing slips past his careful gaze.