I feel I can 2x your products UX which will lead to better sales. Can you help me validate this claim?

I spent the last 10 years working for all sorts of brands as a product designer. Some of them you might be using right now. Coronavirus has shifted my worldview and I decided to slowly start building something for myself. And you. Something that I have more control over. I want to document my insights journey on LinkedIn, Twitter and here.

UX is incredibly important for any product. No matter how good the idea is. If people can't use it. If falls flat. Good UX is about helping your users interact with your business through the shortest possible path. I see UX as a map that helps your user go from point A to B (usually thats a purchase).

I am working on a service called Indie UX Review where I would audit your product based on 70-100 best practices that I had collected over the years. The service would have 3 tiers:

  • Basic landing page audit. 5-10 insights. 50 dollars.
  • Medium sized app audit. 10-20 insights. 150 dollars.
  • Full audit for a large scale app with access to your analytics and 30-50 insights. 500 dollars.

Everything would be presented in a easy to digest PDF document like the one I attached below with a follow up to see how things are going. The document is just for demo purposes. Still needs polishing up, but it's enough to get the idea across.

Demo audit

Can you help me validate this. Is this something you would find useful and see yourself paying for it? If no, why not?

Thank you very much.

  1. 3

    Love the business idea and there's a lot of good feedback in your document. My constructive feedback would be as follows - the way you've packaged the PDF deliverable won't work. It needs to improve visually. The perceived value isn't there and the suggestions could use a little more sophistication.

    • Your UX pdf needs some visual improvement. If you're selling UX feedback, your document needs to really "WOW" the reader with how good it looks. Otherwise it hurts your UX credibility.
    • Add something about site speed even if it's just screenshots from Google Pagespeed tool.
    • Navigation elements (how visitors actually find product / important pages) - mobile and desktop versions. Many sites have clunky navigation and could use your help here.
    • Clearer differentiator between mobile vs desktop feedback. You have both sections in your PDF but it's randomly thrown together. It could be as simple as calling out which you are giving feedback on (mobile or desktop UX).

    Please take this with a grain of salt. I looked at your document for 5 minutes but these are things that come to mind. Just trying to offer something constructive. There are many positives too.

    1. 1

      Thanks for the good feedback. Agreed for the differentiation between mobile and desktop. Would you say PDF is not a very good format to present this in?

      1. 1

        PDF can work and is a good format for this as long as the screenshots you provide are from the customer's site so it feels relevant and personalized. And get some key pages designed really well - cover page, have nice section break pages, have uniform design elements for headerlines, etc. Basically get the PDF template designed and have a consistent style guide for fonts, sizes and colors you use.

  2. 2

    The previous company I worked at did a similar audit through NNGroup, this is probably the page but not sure: https://www.nngroup.com/consulting/expert-review/, note the pricing.

    One thing they did that I really liked and I think could improve your version it to take screenshots about the specific part of the site your reviewing, and then provide screenshots to example sites that are doing it "right". For example if you're saying my site needs to have a "Buy now" button then include a screenshot of my products buy box with out the button right beside a screenshots of a site that has the "Buy now" button so that I can easily understand what I should do (it works better for more complex examples of course).

    I like the idea though!

    1. 1

      It's amazing to see that a company of such stature displays its pricing tiers that way.

      1. 2

        Right! I was pretty blown away. They know their target market is large companies where price doesn't really matter so presumably they display the price even though it's huge as a sign of the value they will receive. Alternatively if the price was say $30 a company like Amazon wouldn't even bother.

  3. 2

    Yes,this is useful and a great idea.

    Would love to test it with Wicked Templates if possible.
    ( I have some wrong links now on the buttons that I didn't had time to fix today, but tonight it will be fixed )

    If this works I would be happy to feature this on my newsletter unicornsfeed.com with 1.5k...

    1. 1

      Thanks, Michael! Out of curiosity. Which plan would you buy? Tier 1,2 or 3?

      1. 1

        I can't answer that because I haven't seen any a real Audit.

        And if so, I would buy the first one to try.

        1. 1

          Fair enough. A plan would be to create a good demo of all 3 tiers.

          1. 1

            That would be interesting!

  4. 1

    Think this is an awesome idea. I would love to test this with https://kbee.app. I would go for the 2nd tier.

  5. 1

    I'm going to disagree with the rest of the comments here. I don't think this is something I would pay for.

    There's a quality problem that I think is difficult to get around. You as a business are incentivized to pump out as many audits as possible. So as a potential customer, I'd be very wary of paying for a PDF that could be filled with bad suggestions.

    In the past, I've paid for an SEO keyword audit and it was a total ripoff. The person barely skimmed my site and made terrible suggestions that weren't relevant.

    The one off nature of these transactions makes them ripe for these kinds of issues.

    Maybe something on a recurring basis would be better? A UX professional as a subscription service?

    1. 1

      Sorry to hear about the SEO audit. The biggest challenge is to not get greedy and actually provide good insight. Not easy to do. It feels like you want more commitment from a service. Someone you could talk to if you have a UX question right?

      1. 1

        Yeah, IMO it's easier to make a decision of worth if you have an ongoing relationship. Eg. I hire developers on Upwork sometimes for hourly rates. I don't need to think twice about it because I know I can just end the contract if I'm not happy with it.

    2. 1

      Btw, instead of asking if the product would be useful (of course it could be useful) it might make more sense to ask if anyone has paid for this service or a similar one in the past.

  6. 1

    Good idea. There are some product dev professionals on upwork and similar selling a similar service. Definitely a market for it. I think the feedback about structuring as a product are good.

  7. 1

    That would be quite useful. I would be happy to try it with some of my projects I am currently working on. Let me know when it becomes available!

    1. 1

      Thanks, mariusla. I will probably be posting a launch here as well:)

  8. 1

    Yes, it woud be useful.

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