UX Audits
UX insights that uncover what's holding your product back – and respect your codebase.
Most UX audits stop at the interface. At Thinkmill, we go deeper – assessing how your product is actually built. By understanding your underlying stack, we give you more than a wish list: shippable, tech-aware advice that helps move the needle on business outcomes.
Need a UX Audit?
Get in touchVocal wouldn’t be what it is today without Thinkmill. The team shaped the product visually, technically, and ethically, as we grew from a hunch to a multi-million user network.
Justin Maury
Chief Operating Officer, Vocal
Why get a UX Audit?
As products scale, it’s easy for usability and business intent to drift apart. Without regular review, friction builds, journeys degrade, and conversion or retention can suffer. A UX Audit helps you uncover where that’s happening – and what to do about it.
You might benefit from this audit if…
You need to validate design intent before building.
You’re preparing for a rebrand, rebuild, or design system initiative.
Your teams are shipping features without a reliable UX foundation.
Your users are reporting friction or struggling to self-serve.
You need evidence to prioritise UX improvements in your roadmap.
Who is this for?
- Business and product leaders who need clarity on where UX improvements will deliver the greatest commercial impact – and evidence to prioritise them confidently.
- Founders preparing to build, rebuild, or campaign for new investment.
- Engineering-led teams building without a dedicated designer.
- Product owners needing to justify roadmap priorities.
- Designers needing external validation before a system rollout.
Pricing
Audits start from $10,000 AUD for a five-day, targeted review with a clear scope, led by a UX design expert, and reinforced with specialist UX engineers.
We can tailor our advisory to your delivery needs and the mode you’re in, whether it’s a high-level survey of your product experience or a focused look at some critical flows.
Our process in a nutshell
- Understand the current state of your product from the perspectives of your team, your technology, and your end users.
- Identify the key journeys that must be optimised to enable self-serve audience efficiencies.
- Define the best practice principles that we’ll assess the current state experience against. These will become our review criteria.
- Map the current state and review the identified journeys using the defined principles to assess what’s working, and where the gaps and opportunities for improvement lie.
- Assess your tech stack to understand how and where your underlying technologies can enable UX improvements, and also where a better user experience may be limited by your technology.
- Document and define the areas to improve across short and long timeframes into a format that can be easily acted upon by your stakeholders and delivery teams.
What we cover
Navigation and Information Architecture
Are key user tasks easy to find and complete?
Onboarding
Is the purpose of the app clear from the design, and are permissions and setup steps well explained?
Usability and Interaction Patterns
Are controls touch-friendly and easy to use, and are interaction patterns discoverable and consistent?
Visual Design and Hierarchy
Is visual hierarchy clear and consistent throughout the design?
Feedback
Does the design provide feedback (e.g. loading, success, error) when a user attempts or completes an action?
Accessibility
Does the design support screen readers, contrast needs, and text resizing?
Content
Is the copy concise, consistent, and fitting for the tasks your audience needs to complete with the app?
Platform
Do the designs adhere to the platform’s (web, Android, iOS) established patterns and conventions?
After a Thinkmill UX Audit, you’ll come away with:
- Clarity on what’s working and what’s holding your UX back, grounded in best practice and your users’ real goals.
- Annotated journey maps that highlight friction in key flows, and how it’s impacting engagement or conversion.
- A UX principles framework tailored to your audience and product strategy, so decisions stay aligned, even after the audit.
- An engineering and design-friendly report and presentation, with realistic next steps that factor in tech constraints and quick wins your team can actually ship.
- Clear priorities for what to fix now, what to plan for, and how to make the case internally.
You'll get a clear view of how your product experience impacts key outcomes – from activation and conversion to retention and efficiency. Our reports give teams practical next steps, and give leaders confidence they're investing in the right areas.
Thinkmill has been instrumental in shaping our design function. In fact I would say we have successfully implemented a design process that is uniquely Reckon’s, and that is succeeding in a very complex product environment.
Jason Hollis
General Manager of Product, Reckon
Answers to common UX Audit questions
- Yes. We regularly audit experiences that span multiple brands, product lines, or regions. We focus on identifying systemic friction that affects both customer experience and business performance.
- That’s ideal. We’ll connect your existing insights to business goals and identify where to focus next, so your current UX work has greater impact and alignment.
- We can. The fixed-price audit is based on the review conducted by our UX experts, but we often deploy user research as a parallel or follow-on engagement.
- The UX Audit focuses on user journeys and interface experience across your product. A Design System Audit focuses on the underlying system and architecture of reusable UI.
- We can audit whatever platforms are in scope for your product. Our baseline pricing typically targets a single platform with a reasonable amount of surface area. But we can also review several platforms if you have a small area. We’ll tailor our approach accordingly.
- Access helps, but isn’t essential. We can tailor the audit to what’s available, whether it’s stakeholder input, session recordings, prototypes, or production code.
- Yes. We often work with engineering-led teams or product owners who want to build better UX foundations. We’ll tailor our language and outputs to your context.
- Yes. We include light systems mapping to surface where platform or CMS choices may be limiting your ability to improve UX – and what to do about it.
- Yes. Our findings include evidence of where poor UX creates friction, lost revenue, or delivery inefficiency. Many teams use the audit report to support prioritisation and funding discussions.
- We’ve audited marketplaces, internal platforms, public websites, SaaS products, and mobile apps. Our methods are adaptable to different industries and business models.
- That’s ideal. We’ll help connect the dots across efforts, identify gaps, and give you a clear picture of what to tackle next – so you can build on the work you’ve already done.
- Yes – indirectly. We highlight any UX patterns that negatively impact accessibility and recommend improvements. For a deeper dive, our Accessibility Audit is purpose-built for that.
Learn more about our UX work
Deep dive into more articles and videos related to UX.
talk
Delightful products, the Antifragile way
Boris recently spoke at Dovetail’s Delighters Conference about our method for building great products within cross-functional teams.
talk
How to establish multi-disciplinary teams to effectively design and build products
Lauren recently co-presented with Paul Merrell from Meld Studios at UX Australia 2022 about how Thinkmill & Meld established a multi-disciplinary team to effectively design and build a product.
talk
Engineering-led design
Lauren Argenta describes Thinkmill’s Engineering-led Design mindset, and the 5 behaviours that a cross-disciplinary team can adopt to make work life (and the software we make) better.
screencast
Design, content, & code in parallel: Thinkmill’s new website
Simon made a playback of an internal team presentation we did this week. It looks at how we built the new Thinkmill website in a hyper-iterative way; with content, design, and code evolving in parallel streams. Our journey to launch presented an interesting set of challenges and learning opportunities.
Want to know more? Chat to our UX team
Get in touch to discuss how we can help you improve your product’s experience to better meet user needs and business goals.
