A teardown essentially involves breaking down the components of a product or website in order to identify and analyze key parts and how they are working looking for improvement’s opportunities.
Easily put, it’s kind of giving feedback from your professional point of view about the product at hand. That means that your teardown will be mainly focused on your niche.
If you are a web designer, you’ll focus on analyzing the design of the site and the things that can be improved: colors, figures, pages, positions, etc.
If you are a UX designer, this will be your main focus: Does the user understand immediately what the website is about and what the next steps are to do what he wants to?
If you are a business consultant, you might want to discuss the business model or pricing strategy of a particular service.
A teardown can be excellent at showing what elements of a website may not be working effectively, allowing you to really showcase your skills to potential clients and show them why they need your services.
A teardown can be excellent to showcase your skills and show potential clients why they need your services.
Teardowns focus on multiple elements of a website, analyzing how each one works and whether it positively contributes towards building an environment that may encourage visitors to convert into clients.
You don’t have to be targeting a particular client in order to create a teardown. You could instead pick a well-known website in the same niche in which you are looking for clients.
In this teardown, for example, Val Geisler chooses to do a teardown of CoSchedule’s email onboarding to showcase her expertise in this field.
When creating a teardown yourself, you will need to identify which elements you will be breaking down (below, we identified some of the most common components you might cover, although this list is not exhaustive).
If you are a web designer, for example, there are some elements that make more sense to break down than if you are a copywriter.
Things you might analyze on the home page as a web designer include:
Things you could analyze on a landing page as a copywriter:
Now you have your checklist of the components you will analyse, you need to go through each one and decide if they need improving on the website you have chosen to include in your teardown.
Following with the website example, things you might look at include:
You have been analyzing the web in question or the product that you have chosen and now it is time for you to show your findings, which ones work and which ones you would improve.
There are different formats to do a teardown and present your ideas.
A few teardown formats are:
Of course you can make a combination of all these formats (and any other you might want to use) to offer the teardown to different people that want to consume content in a different way.
In the example of Val Geisler that we mentioned before, Val uses her blog to do the e-mail onboarding tear downs and combine screenshots with text. In addition to making her comments as she presents the sequence of emails, she includes examples with improved e-mails that she would use and ends up summarizing the good uses, the bad uses and the ugly ones.
Now it’s your turn!
Have you ever done a teardown to show what you can do as a freelancer? Let us know what components you covered in your teardown, and if it helped!
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