How an industry audit can fast-track your next redesign
You often hear about auditing your own site when carrying out a redesign but auditing your competitors can help realign the company and breathe fresh ideas into the process.
I was recently tasked to carry out an agile redesign of an early-stage startup’s website in just 8 weeks. A key component in this project’s success was the industry audit.
Why do an audit?
Often the founders/founding team are so “close” to their industry and are moving so fast to innovate that taking time to zoom out to a “birds eye” view from a newcomer’s perspective can really help focus, get everyone on the same page and provide autonomy to execute quickly through later stages of the design process.
Setting up the audit
Take full-page screenshots of each of the competitors’ websites. I like to use a handy chrome extension aptly named “Full Page Screen Capture”. This can be of the homepage, and/or key subpages related to the sections you’re going to be redesigning. Place these side by side in a document of your choice, we prefer Figma as it allows for real-time team collaboration.
With the screenshots side by side you will already start to see clear similarities and differences.
What to review
1. Content.
Review the content and layout choices and reverse engineer basic wireframes. This further emphasises each site’s underlying structure and rhythm. Note down key sections and list them in order. e.g. Reviews/testimonials, pricing, features, special offers, FAQ, video intros. This exercise helps to surface what the industry feels is important to convey. Now ask yourself, are we “missing” anything? For sure the incumbents have done a tonne more user research with vastly larger resources and so consider their choices when informing your own content and communications strategy.
2. Color.
What are key colors used across each site? Note down colors of calls-to-action, buttons, backgrounds, navigation, etc. Create swatches of commonly used colors for each site. This knowledge will help to develop your own brand swatch.
3. Imagery.
What visuals are used? Is there an emphasis on photography or illustration? Are there specific styles within these categories such as hand-drawn or vector? Do they use eye-catching GIFs? Are they using stock sourced assets or is it likely custom made? Are people shown? If so note down their style and environment. This often gives an indicator of the company’s target audience. How does your brand wish to compare?
4. Iconography.
Are icons used? If so, where? Are they used for navigation or decoration? What library are they from? Are they using fancy new things like animated Lotti SVGs?
5. Typography.
What font choices are used? Is there dynamic use of large and small fonts to give personality and assist the reader experience? To find font choices you can inspect the page in developer mode or use plugins like WhatFont to quickly pull out styles.
6. Copywriting.
Text takes up perhaps the majority of a site so don’t leave copywriting consideration to the last minute. Is the site text heavy and dense? What is the brand tone? Chatty or formal? Do they talk about feelings and evoke emotion or is it practical and dry? For weekly inspiration check out https://www.heynishi.com for some pretty, pretty, prettttaaaay good…copywriting (and their 6 rules)
When organising copy I like to use the A.I.D.A principles to funnel users effectively into a sale — Attention, Interest, Desire and Action.
Audit adjacent industries too
Once you’ve done with closest competitors It can be useful to go a little broader and conduct audits of adjacent tech firms outside your core domain. This helps to gauge wider trends and can open up fresh angles for your own brand. In this case we chose well known B2C firms, marketplaces and SaaS.
A foundation for success
The audit was never asked for as part of the redesign brief but it became clear that this foundational step was instrumental in getting “buy in” from key stakeholders which helped accelerate the process and keep to deadlines.
It unlocked things that the Scrimba team had felt or knew subconsciously but hadn’t explicitly been presented with or openly discussed and kicked off short workshops where the brand was further distilled using agile frameworks such as the “3 hour brand sprint” from Google.
What came out was a high level overview of the brand personality which made for more efficient and objective decision making as the design was defined further. Overall I noticed that my designs got approved faster and team morale was kept upbeat and positive with a north star ✨to follow.
Thanks for reading! If you liked this article please give it some claps to encourage me to keep writing! My name is Daniel Butler, I’m a tech entrepreneur with a specialism in digital branding and design. Connect with me on Twitter or Linkedin. Details of my projects can be found at DNLBTLR.com ✌️
