First and foremost, what’s a digital experience audit and why should my company be doing one? Fundamentally, it’s a multifaceted evaluation of your digital products, platforms and touchpoints, as well as the enablers - people, processes, insights - supporting them. The objective of this holistic assessment is to gain an understanding of your company’s digital experience landscape and identify strengths, weaknesses, and areas of opportunity for enhancing it.
While digital experience audit engagements can vary in scope depending on a company’s industry, digital maturity, and complexity of its digital ecosystem, below are five critical focus areas every audit should address:
1. Are you listening to your audiences?
The foundation of any successful digital relationship between a company and its customers is a growing understanding of needs. Find ways to capture and leverage recurring audience feedback. This positions you to better shape your experience to delight your customers and quickly adapt to serve their evolving needs.
2. Is your content delivering?
Quality of content is the single biggest differentiator in any digital experience, but people don't often prioritize it when planning and executing digital campaigns. Evaluating content value, how it is structured and its digital proficiency should be a key focus of any experience audit.
3. Are your digital products as usable as possible?
If content is the biggest differentiator within a digital product experience, usability is the biggest determinant of its success. Grounding experiences in good heuristic principles, evaluating testing practices, and applying established principles of accessibility should be actionable outcomes of an audit.
4. Is your brand expression effectively represented through design?
The experience design of your digital portfolio is the connective tissue between your company and everyone of its customer relationships. Measuring up your digital product experiences’ ability to effectively communicate your brand should always be a prioritized component of these types of engagements.
5. Am I capturing the right data and how am I using it?
Analytics are an incredibly powerful way to gain insights on your customers’ needs, behaviors and preferences. However data alone is meaningless without the appropriate context. Ensuring analytic strategies and measurement plans mapped to priority KPIs are key elements of successful audits.
