Most UX audits are long, expensive, and full of beautifully formatted reports you’ll never read twice. This isn’t that. This is the UX sanity check — the quick-and-dirty, seven-question sweep I use when I want to know if a product is healthy enough to survive the week.
It’s not a replacement for a proper deep-dive audit, but it’s a great way to find the obvious leaks before they sink you.
And yes — you can actually do this in less than 15 minutes. No post-its. No mood boards. No design thinking theatre.
Why Bother With a 15-Minute UX Audit?
Because most teams wait until things are on fire before asking,
Hey, should we maybe check if users can actually use this?
By then, you’re already hemorrhaging conversions, support tickets are piling up, and your developers are quietly updating their LinkedIn profiles. A quick UX sanity check gives you:
- Immediate insight into where you’re losing users
- A prioritised list of fixes (without the analysis paralysis)
- The ability to stop making the same mistakes on new features
If you pass all 7 checks, you can sleep a little easier. If you fail more than 2… well, we should probably talk.
The 7-Point UX Sanity Check
Each of these takes 2 minutes or less. Yes, really.
1. Can a First-Time User Get to Value in 3 Clicks or Less?
If it takes 12 steps, 4 forms, and a welcome video to get someone to the thing they signed up for, you’ve lost them. This is where you identify onboarding bloat — the “helpful” steps that are actually hurdles.
Quick fix: Strip out anything non-essential from the first-time flow. Let users succeed before you teach them the advanced stuff.
2. Is Your Primary Call-to-Action Impossible to Miss?
If your main “Buy Now” or “Start Free Trial” button looks exactly like every other button on the page, you’ve buried your revenue. CTAs need visual priority — size, colour, placement.
Quick fix: Pick one primary action per screen. Make it obvious, make it bold, and make everything else look less important.
Example: I once asked a founder to point to their primary CTA. They took 14 seconds to find it. If you can’t spot it instantly, your users definitely can’t.
3. Are You Using Real Words or Internal Jargon?
If your navigation reads like your Jira board, you’re doing it wrong. Users don’t care about your internal feature codenames. They want plain language that matches their goals.
Quick fix: Rewrite labels and tooltips in the words your users actually use. If you wouldn’t say it to a customer in conversation, it doesn’t belong in your UI.
Example: We swapped “Resource Allocation Matrix” for “Team Planner” on a SaaS dashboard. Usage doubled.
4. Does Your Product Work on the Device Your Users Actually Use?
You’d be amazed how many “mobile-friendly” products turn into scrolling nightmares on a phone. Or how many desktop dashboards are unusable on smaller laptops.
Quick fix: Check your analytics. Test on the top 2 devices and browsers your users actually use. Fix those first.
Example: One client had a critical form that cut off the submit button on 13” laptops. It was there… just under the fold with no scroll indicator. We moved it up, completion rates went from 32% to 51%.
5. Can a User Undo a Mistake Without Rage-Quitting?
No confirmation before deleting something important? No “Undo” after a big action? Congratulations, you’ve just given someone a panic attack.
Quick fix: Add clear confirmations for destructive actions, and an easy way to reverse them. This isn’t a “nice to have” — it’s basic user safety.
Example: A B2B platform I’m using had no confirmation before sending invoices. Someone coukd accidentally bill a client $120,000 instead of 12,000.
6. Are Your Most Frequent Support Tickets Actually UX Bugs?
If your support team answers the same “How do I…?” question every week, that’s not a training issue. That’s a design issue.
Quick fix: Go through the top 10 support tickets. If more than 2 are about how to do something basic, fix the flow or the copy.
Example: A well-known fintech app kept getting “How do I reset my password?” tickets. The link was hidden in account settings under “Security Preferences.” They moved it to the login screen. Tickets dropped 90% overnight.
7. Are You Tracking the Right UX Metrics?
If you’re only watching DAU/MAU or signups, you’re missing the leaks. You need metrics tied to actual user success — task completion, error rates, drop-offs in key flows.
Quick fix: Pick one success metric per core flow. Track it. Improve it. Repeat.
What to Do if You Fail the Sanity Check
Failing 1–2 checks?
Make a quick fix plan and schedule them in your next sprint.
Failing 3–4?
You need a focused UX/UI debt cleanup before you add more features.
Failing 5+?
Stop building new features immediately. You’re just adding debt on top of debt.
The beauty of these UX audits is it forces prioritisation. It’s not about making everything perfect — it’s about making sure nothing critical is actively driving users away.
Great UX doesn’t happen by accident, and it definitely doesn’t happen if you never check the basics. Run this sanity check every quarter. It’ll keep you honest, keep your users happy, and keep your developers from quietly weeping into their coffee.
If you want the real deep dive? That’s when we break out the big guns — full product audit, heatmaps, session recordings, the works. But you don’t need that to start plugging the obvious leaks.
Fifteen minutes. Seven questions. No excuses.