In 2005, the band Hot Hot Heat released the song “Middle of Nowhere,” featuring the lyric “I’m just consistently inconsistent.” While perhaps most simply a fun play on words, it’s a universally understood line that almost everyone in the tech world can relate to in one way or another. Such is especially true of design audits.
Design audits are meant to measure the strength and consistency of a brand. But oftentimes, they’re viewed more as a luxury feature rather than a must-have. With new tech trends constantly emerging and tech stacks being regularly updated, however, it’s becoming increasingly important for company UX/UI designers to monitor the scalability and cohesiveness of their audience’s experience while engaging with their services.
After all, clicking on a feature that leads to an error page, or taking notice when a logo’s design on one widget doesn’t match the rest of the brand’s communication is jarring. Anything that takes a customer out of the experience leaves room for additional questions or credibility-based judgments.
That’s exactly why we caught up with three NYC-based tech companies to learn more about the best practices their teams swear by to keep each brand strong and running seamlessly. Got cutting-edge design ideas? They also happen to be hiring.
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How often does your team perform a design audit, and what are you typically looking for?
Our team is constantly doing design audits. We have many products and some aren’t built in the same tech stack, so we aren’t always able to use components from our design system across the board. We try to keep components as consistent as possible across all products, but it is definitely a challenge.
What’s a best practice your team follows to streamline the design audit process and make regular check-ups more manageable?
We are lucky in that we have a dedicated person to work on our design system, and she happens to be embedded in our team. The benefits of having a dedicated person on the team focused on the design system is a huge part of keeping things consistent and up to date. Because she is part of our team meetings, especially our design critiques, she is able to catch things that may not be included in our system or call out where else we can use a component.
Having regular check-ins across designers helps everyone stay up to date with new components and make updates to old ones.”
How do regular design audits help you inform future UX/UI strategies or standards?
Having regular check-ins across designers helps everyone stay up to date with new components and make updates to old ones. This is always going to be an ongoing process because features are ever-changing and so are trends. For example, we decided that we wanted to update the corner radius of our buttons. So we all agreed on what we liked, updated our design system and tried to make sure we could catch buttons that weren’t using our design system components.
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How often does your team perform a design audit, and what are you typically looking for?
Typically once or twice per year before a major milestone. For example, we audit our visual assets to rebrand our website. Or we audit our icons when we switch to SVG icons.
We are looking into four main categories: UI consistency, UX consistency, communication consistency and brand consistency. Consistent layout, spacing and visuals create a familiar sense of ‘space’ to know where to look for the desired information. Consistent workflows reduce cognitive load and make the user more confident with the tasks. Consistent UI language and iconography creates a more effective communication channel. And consistent design language across all platforms makes the product stand out.
What’s a best practice your team follows to streamline the design audit process and make regular check-ups more manageable?
A systematic approach to conducting the audit and making design decisions. We break down our audits into small pieces (by page, product, component).
Use audits as an opportunity to scale design language and build reusable components.”
Once you’ve completed the audit and you have a list of recommendations, how do you ensure those changes are implemented and who else is involved in that process?
Scale the design system. The inconsistency emerges when the design language is not scalable. Use audits as an opportunity to scale design language and build reusable components.
Plan ahead. Audits are expensive and may need collaboration outside the design team. Defining clear scope upfront reduces the risk of postponing the audit. Breaking down the implementation into small incremental changes can reduce implementation pressure.
Tempus enables physicians to deliver personalized patient care through an interactive and analytical machine learning platform that makes data accessible and useful.
How often does your team perform a design audit, and what are you typically looking for?
Our team performs regular design audits about once a year, and we’re currently in the process of an audit and evaluation of our visual design system across our brand and product experience. We’re looking for ways to improve consistency and accessibility as well as opportunities to elevate the design and experience of our products.
Our company and design team have grown immensely since we initially established our brand guidelines and design system, and we’re rapidly developing new products with unique needs and audiences. So regular design audits are key. As our company and product offerings expand, it becomes increasingly more important to develop and maintain a unified brand experience – from our marketing materials to our software products.
Accessibility is also very important to us, and we’re actively aiming to improve accessibility and usability across all of our products. As our user base continues to grow, we’re looking for ways to make our products as accessible and inclusive as we can. Through this audit, we’re addressing accessibility issues and incorporating standards and best practices to help guide design decisions around color, typography, interactions, etc., which sometimes means making tradeoffs between aesthetics and usability for highly functional elements. Ultimately our goal is to design better, more useful tools for more people.
Audits also allow us to revisit our designs on a regular basis so we can continue to evolve and improve our brand. We have a high bar for design. We’re doing some innovative and high-tech work in the healthcare technology space, and we need to somehow bring that to life in our branding and product design. Audits allow us to constantly reevaluate our work, push our designs further, and strengthen our brand identity and customer experience.
What’s a best practice your team follows to streamline the design audit process and make regular check-ups more manageable?
Auditing is difficult at a company like Tempus because we move so quickly and we’re building new products at a ridiculous pace. A new product team emerges nearly every quarter, so cross-functional communication and collaboration is key. An audit requires careful coordination across all of those autonomous product pods, each of which has a design team focused on their unique users’ needs. Furthermore, the brand design team is responsible for our website and marketing collateral, all of which must be considered in an audit.
The most reliable best practice we’ve found is documentation of the design system and how decisions are made, so all future designers who join our team understand what came before. After five years of defining and evolving the Tempus brand, I’m excited to be leading our recently formed design system team responsible for articulating the decisions we make and why.
Our guiding principle is scalability: the design system must be prescriptive enough to ensure the highest design standards, but flexible enough to be adapted to future requirements. This is no small feat when the business is not only scaling within oncology, but across new disease areas like neurological disorders, infectious disease, and cardiovascular disease, and more in the future. Our user base is expanding in multiple dimensions, so a simple, linear set of guidelines won’t be sufficient.
Our goal is to design better, more useful tools for more people.”
Once you’ve completed the audit and you have a list of recommendations, how do you ensure those changes are implemented and who else is involved in that process?
We’re currently working on a number of exciting design initiatives across the organization that contribute to our visual brand identity, including a website redesign and new look and feel for our software products.
We’re thinking about the entire customer experience, so it takes constant communication and collaboration between multiple cross-functional teams. For an effort like this, we try to involve relevant teams, including design, product, engineering, and marketing from the early stages of audits. Collaboration early on allows us to discuss feedback, brainstorm ideas, and share knowledge of any upcoming deadlines so everyone can plan ahead as much as possible.
At the end of the day, everyone’s goal is to deliver the best product possible, so it’s about prioritizing and working together to make that happen.
