Context
Inspectorio is an enterprise supply chain compliance platform used by global retailers to audit their supplier networks. The product I was assigned to — Inspectorio Rise — was the company's highest-revenue offering and used daily by sourcing and compliance teams at Tesco, one of the world's largest retailers.
When I joined, the product had accumulated several years of design debt. Features had been built reactively in response to client requests, and the UX lacked coherent patterns. Users were experienced, high-stakes professionals — Tesco executives running supplier compliance for a global supply chain — and they had clear, unspoken expectations about efficiency and reliability.
Problem
NPS was declining. The product team knew there were usability issues but had limited visibility into which problems were causing the most pain. The roadmap was feature-driven, not problem-driven, and there was no regular user testing process in place.
My brief was broad: improve the product experience. I chose to start with a rigorous UX audit before writing a single spec.
Process
Heuristic evaluation
I ran a full heuristic evaluation across all major flows in the product — supplier onboarding, audit scheduling, compliance reporting, and corrective action tracking. I documented every violation against Nielsen's 10 heuristics and severity-rated each issue on a 1–4 scale. The output was a 47-page audit report with 84 distinct issues.
User testing with actual Tesco executives
Rather than relying on the audit alone, I established bi-weekly testing sessions directly with Tesco's compliance team. This was unusual — most enterprise product teams test with internal proxies. I pushed for the real users and got access. Over 6 months we ran 12 moderated sessions covering core task flows.
The sessions revealed that the most painful issues weren't the ones I'd severity-rated highest in the heuristic evaluation. Power users had developed workarounds for some problems but were consistently blocked by a small cluster of friction points around bulk action flows and report exports.
Prioritisation and roadmap alignment
I cross-referenced the heuristic audit with testing findings and business impact data (which features were most used, which generated the most support tickets) to produce a prioritised fix list. I presented this to the product and engineering leads with effort/impact estimates for each item.
Design and iteration
I redesigned the bulk action patterns, simplified the report export flow from 7 steps to 3, and created a new information architecture for the compliance dashboard. Each change went back through testing with Tesco before shipping.
Outcome
NPS on the Inspectorio Rise product increased by 8% over the 6 months following the audit and initial improvements. More significantly, we established a permanent testing cadence — bi-weekly sessions with real enterprise users became a product team norm rather than a one-off exercise.
The audit report and testing process I built were later adopted by other product teams inside Inspectorio.
Learnings
Test with power users, not proxies. The workarounds Tesco's team had built for themselves would have been invisible in any internal testing. Getting direct access changed the quality of insights completely.
Severity ratings are hypotheses. My heuristic audit predicted a different priority order than what actually mattered to users. The audit was useful for coverage; the testing was useful for truth.
Process design is product design. The most durable output wasn't the redesigned screens — it was the testing cadence. That kept improving the product long after the initial audit work was done.