A Simple UX Audit Checklist for Founders .

A full UX audit digs deep — but you don't need an agency to catch the obvious problems. Here are five checks any founder can run on their own product this week.

1. Time the first action

Open your product as a brand-new user would. How long does it take to reach the first meaningful action — signing up, adding an item, sending a message? If you're counting more than a few seconds of confusion, so are your users.

2. Read your own error messages

Trigger every error state you can find: a failed form submission, an expired session, a bad password. Read the message exactly as written. If it sounds like a stack trace instead of a sentence a human would say, it needs a rewrite.

3. Check mobile, not just desktop

A huge share of first impressions happen on a phone. Load your site on mobile and check whether buttons are actually tappable, text is actually readable, and nothing requires pinch-zooming to use.

4. Follow a support ticket into the product

Pick a recent support request and try to solve it yourself, in-product, the way a user would. If it takes you longer to find the setting than it took the user to give up, that's a UX debt worth paying down.

5. Ask someone who's never used it

Sit a friend or new hire in front of your product with no explanation. Watch where they hesitate. That hesitation is your roadmap.

If this turns up more than a couple of issues, that's exactly the kind of work we do in a UX Audit — happy to talk through what we find.