SaaS Product Audit: InsightAssist

Eliminating friction in a complex survey-building platform through a heuristic-led evaluation and a prioritized roadmap for growth.

Role

Lead UX Consultant

Industry

B2B SaaS / Market Research

Duration

2 Weeks (Jan 2026)

The Challenge : High Stakes, Higher Speed

I was brought into the project just two weeks before a major product launch. The goal wasn't a "blue-sky" redesign; it was a tactical strike to ensure the product was professional, usable, and bug-free before going live.

The Strategic Pivot: Choosing Impact over Idealism

Given the intense time constraint, I made a strategic decision to focus on high-visibility friction points and UI consistency rather than deep structural architectural changes (like sitemap redesigns). I focused on "Quick Wins", ie, issues that were high-impact for the user but could be implemented by the developers within the final pre-launch sprint.

Methodology: A Multi-Layered Evaluation

To ensure the audit was both rigorous and technical, I audited five core user journeys (Dashboard, Creation, Management, Analytics, and Uploading) using three frameworks:

Heuristic Evaluation: Applying Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics to identify where the system broke user mental models.
UI Consistency Review: Identifying "Visual Debt" - inconsistent button styles, affordances, and layout patterns that eroded brand trust.
Accessibility Snapshot: A preliminary review of colour contrast and keyboard navigation to ensure a baseline level of inclusivity.

Key Insights: Identifying Critical Friction

The 26-page audit revealed several high-priority themes:

Decision Paralysis: Identified areas where users were faced with up to four competing entry points for a single task.
The Safety Gap: Flagged critical flows where actions (like publishing) occurred instantly without a confirmation modal, creating a high risk for user error.
Inconsistent Affordances: Found metric cards that looked clickable but weren't, leading to user frustration.
Cognitive Load: Streamlined nested blocks in the survey builder to reduce excessive scrolling.

The Feedback Loop: Collaborative Refinement & Domain Alignment

Before finalising the audit, I conducted a deep-dive walkthrough with the InsightAssist team. This was a critical step to pressure-test my findings against their domain expertise.

Through this dialogue, we identified that a handful of "issues" were actually intentional design choices dictated by specific industry requirements. By listening to their feedback, I was able to iterate on my findings, removing non-actionable points and ensuring the final report was 100% aligned with their business reality. This collaborative approach ensured that the final roadmap was not just a list of critiques, but a deliverable they could actually use.

The Deliverable: A Prioritised Roadmap for Growth

The final deliverable was a 26-page Strategic Audit Report centred around a Severity vs. Effort Matrix. By tagging every issue with its impact on the user (Critical to Minor) and the estimated effort required to fix it, I provided the Product Manager with a "plug-and-play" backlog. This allowed the team to move instantly from my report into their final sprint, removing all guesswork from their design decisions.

Reflections & Key Takeaways

Having worked in a professional environment before this, I had done UX audits for internal products within our organisation. Offering a UX audit as a standalone deliverable for a client was a first and came with its own set of challenges. This project provided a masterclass in balancing design theory with the hard realities of product deadlines.

Here are my 3 key takeaways:

Having a background in engineering, I understood that a "perfect" design that can’t be built in time for a launch is a failure. This project reinforced the importance of focusing on high-impact "Quick Wins" when resources and time are at a premium.
My heuristic evaluation provided a strong baseline, but the walkthrough with the client proved that user experience is always tied to business logic. Learning to listen and iterate based on their specialised domain knowledge was essential to making the final report actually useful.
I realised that the value of an audit isn't just in finding problems, but in how those problems are communicated. By providing a prioritised matrix rather than just a list of bugs, I spoke the language of both Product Managers and Developers, ensuring my design recommendations were implemented.