I Audited 47 Websites Last Month. Here’s the Ugly Truth About How Most Designers Do It.

Most UX audits live and die in a Google Sheet.

You know the one. Columns for “Issue,” “Severity,” “Recommendation.” Rows that multiply until the spreadsheet becomes the thing nobody opens again — not the client, not the team, not even you.

I’ve been that designer. I’ve built those spreadsheets. I’ve exported PDFs from Notion that took longer to format than to write. I’ve copy-pasted screenshots into slides at 11pm before a client call.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, I started wondering: why is there no tool built specifically for this? Not a general note-taker adapted for audits, not a spreadsheet template with conditional formatting. Something that actually understands what a UX audit is.

So I built one.

The problem with how we audit today

The standard UX audit workflow goes something like this: open a website, open a doc, start typing observations. Maybe you have a checklist you’ve developed over time. Maybe you’re working from a framework you learned in a course. But the tool you’re using — Google Docs, Notion, Figma comments, whatever — doesn’t know anything about what you’re doing. It doesn’t know you’re auditing a page. It doesn’t know what a UX pillar is. It treats your audit notes the same way it treats a grocery list.

The friction compounds. You switch between tabs constantly — the website you’re auditing in one window, your notes somewhere else. You take a screenshot, paste it into Figma to annotate it, export it, add it to your doc. You check colour contrast by opening a separate tool. You test responsiveness by resizing your window and hoping. Every one of these is a context switch. Every context switch bleeds focus.

At the end, you have a collection of observations that only you fully understand, in a format that communicates almost nothing to a stakeholder who hasn’t already done three audits themselves.

What I actually wanted

I didn’t want another note-taking app. I wanted something that lived in the browser, on the page I was auditing, and knew what I was doing.

Specifically, I wanted:

A structured checklist that covers the things that actually matter — not a 200-item list that takes four hours to complete, but a focused set of questions across the pillars that define good UX: user flows, visual hierarchy, accessibility, responsiveness, consistency, and overall experience.

Annotation directly on the page. Not screenshots exported to Figma. Not post-it notes in Notion. Click on the thing, leave a note, move on.

Performance data without opening DevTools. Page load time, DOM ready — the basics, right there.

A report I could actually hand to someone. Not a raw export of notes, but a formatted, branded document that communicates findings clearly to a non-designer.

What I built

UX Audit Checklist is a Chrome extension that opens as a persistent side panel on any live website. You open it, you work through a 53-point checklist across six UX pillars, each item tagged by severity (High, Medium, Low). You annotate directly on the page. You track progress. When you’re done, you export a PDF report or generate a shareable link.

It also has a set of Pro inspection tools that run directly on the page — a Breakpoint Simulator for testing viewport sizes without resizing your browser, a Vision Simulator for checking how the page looks under different types of colour blindness, a Font and Contrast Inspector that shows accessibility metrics as you hover over elements, and a Headings Map for reviewing semantic structure at a glance.

The checklist covers the things that actually matter. Not 200 items. Not a framework invented by someone who’s never done a client audit. A focused, structured set of questions built around how working designers actually think about UX quality.

The annotations work the way you’d expect. Click on the element you want to note, leave a comment, move on. No switching tabs, no exporting screenshots.

The report is the part I’m most proud of. After a full audit, you export a PDF that shows your findings, your progress across each pillar, your notes, and your annotations. It looks like a deliverable, because it is one.

You can also share it with a single link — a clean public page that anyone can open without installing anything.

Why this exists

I built this because I spent years doing UX audits in tools that didn’t know I was doing a UX audit. Every workflow I developed was a workaround — a better spreadsheet, a smarter Notion template, a slightly less painful way to do the same frustrating thing.

The feedback from the first people who tried it confirmed I wasn’t alone. “I didn’t realise how much time I was losing to the switching” was the comment I heard most often.

Everything you need to actually do the audit is free. The full checklist, annotations, and performance data are free, permanently. The live inspection tools are free too — for your first 30 days. The only thing behind the paid plan is the deliverable itself: the full report, PDF export, and the shareable link. Try it on a page you know well before you decide whether you need that part.

If you do UX audits — even occasionally — install it and run it on a page you know well. I think you’ll see what you’ve been missing.

Get UX Audit Checklist on the Chrome Web Store →

UX Audit Checklist