The idea for “Walking the Store” came from an unexpected place: retail. In brick-and-mortar stores, managers routinely “walk the store” to audit how customers experience the space: checking signage, product displays, and overall flow. It’s a hands-on way to ensure that the experience matches the intention.
In digital product design, the same concept applies; only instead of aisles and shelves, we’re walking through screens and flows.
I first heard about this idea from my manager, who referenced Katie Dill’s episode on Lenny’s Podcast. Dill, then a design leader at Stripe, talked about how her teams regularly audited key user journeys, walking through them as a group to identify regressions and opportunities for improvement.
Her philosophy stuck with me: quality is a group effort. As features evolve and new releases stack up, experience quality can degrade. I wanted to bring that same discipline of regular UX auditing to my own team.
The concept wasn’t entirely new at AppFolio — it was part of our broader Design Strategy to drive better UX quality across the product. But I wanted to make it more than a directive. I wanted to make it a team ritual — something fun, collaborative, and deeply impactful.
So, I introduced “Walking the Store” to our product team working on the Vendor Pay and Instant Pay feature. This feature helps service vendors onboard into the portal and set up their payment preferences, a process critical for both conversion and trust.
To start, I created a Customer Journey Map for our vendor personas. Vendors typically find work through referrals, get invited to join the portal, complete work orders, and eventually get paid. Our focus was on that initial onboarding moment — the first impression that shapes everything that follows.
I outlined every step a vendor and a property manager might take during onboarding. This meant capturing not just the “happy path,” but all the variations and dependencies across roles and workflows.
Using Coda, I built a task matrix that listed each action in the onboarding process — who performs it (vendor or property manager), what system it happens in, and what success looks like. This table became our script for the audit.
I scheduled a one-hour session with our developers, QA, product manager, and stakeholders. During the meeting, one team member played the role of the user and shared their screen as we “walked” through each step in the onboarding flow — from invite to setup.
We treated it like a usability test for our own product. I took notes in real time, logged issues, and recorded the session so others could watch later.
Paper cuts are any “rough edges” in the user experience. We used Nielsen’s heuristics as a guideline to help the team recognize usability issues in our feature.
Within that first walkthrough, we uncovered:
- Several small paper cuts (micro-frictions) that slowed users down
- A couple of form bugs related to field validation
- And a 2FA flow issue that confused even our internal team
After the session, we transferred our “paper cuts” into JIRA as cards under a new “UX Audit” epic. Over time, we tracked which issues were fixed, which remained, and which needed reprioritization in the next quarter’s audit. This continuous loop helped us measure tangible improvements instead of one-off wins.
The impact was immediate:
🐞 Bugs fixed before they reached production
💡 Single Usability Metric (SUM) score improved by 68%
💰 Conversion rates and revenue for Vendor Pay increased
The best part? The team loved it.
In retros, people mentioned how refreshing it was to see the experience together instead of just talking about it. It strengthened empathy across disciplines — engineers saw pain points firsthand, and designers gained new allies in advocating for quality.
After seeing the impact, I turned “Walking the Store” into a quarterly recurring event on our team calendar.
We already had retros, grooming, and sprint planning — so why not make UX auditing part of our operating rhythm too? Each quarter, we’d revisit the same journeys, check our improvements, and uncover new opportunities.
It became a rhythm that kept our UX quality high and our collaboration strong.
In early 2025, I had the opportunity to share this practice with the wider UX community.
An old colleague invited me to speak at SDXD, the San Diego UX organization. I created a FigJam template, designed a presentation deck, and led an in-person workshop with 50 UX designers.
Together, we “Walked the Store” through the Feeding San Diego website — identifying usability gaps and brainstorming improvements. I later shared the team’s findings with the organization’s marketing director, turning the exercise into real community impact.
