DesignTech · EXP #05

UXBeacon

A free, login-free UX audit tool that crawls up to 25 pages of a site and runs six deterministic analysis engines in parallel, producing a transparent, exportable health score.

All experiments
01

Problems solved

  • Small problems with my website or app keep piling up
  • I do not know what is wrong with my website without paying an expert
  • I find it hard to make website colours look right
02

Context

Most quick UX-audit tools either require a login and a sales conversation, or they return an AI-generated score with no visibility into how it was calculated. UXBeacon set out to be the opposite: free, instant, and built entirely on rules a designer could actually inspect and argue with.

03

The challenge

The product needed to analyse a real website — crawling multiple pages — and turn that into a single trustworthy score, fast enough to feel instant, without hiding behind an opaque AI model or a sign-up wall.

04

Research

Grounded every scoring engine in an established, citable framework — Nielsen's heuristics, WCAG 2.2, classic UX laws — specifically so the tool's output could be traced back to a rule, not a black-box model's opinion.

05

Insights

The key findings that shaped the direction.

01

Designers don't trust scores they can't trace

A score is only useful if you can ask 'why' and get a concrete rule as the answer — deterministic, rule-based scoring builds more trust than a higher-sounding AI score.

02

No login is a feature, not a compromise

Removing the sign-up step wasn't just about lower friction — it changed how the tool got used, as a quick sanity-check rather than a formal audit process.

03

One score isn't enough, but five is too many to act on

A single composite score is useful for a first read, but only broken into heuristics, accessibility, content and UX-law categories does it tell you where to actually start fixing.

06

How decisions were made

  1. 01

    Build on citable rules, not a model. Implemented each analysis engine — heuristics, accessibility, content, UX laws — as a deterministic rule set that produces the same score for the same input every time.

  2. 02

    Remove every barrier to a first scan. Required no account and no setup — just a URL — so trying the tool costs nothing more than typing a website address.

  3. 03

    Score in layers. Combined five category scores into one weighted A–F health score, so the tool answers both 'how good is this site' and 'good at what, specifically.'

  4. 04

    Make results portable. Built PDF, CSV and JSON export from the start, since a UX audit is rarely useful only inside the tool that generated it.

07

Solution

A free, login-free UX audit tool that crawls up to 25 pages of a site and runs six deterministic analysis engines in parallel, producing a transparent, exportable health score.

  • Six analysis engines: heuristics, accessibility, content, UX laws, health score, exports
  • Deterministic, rule-based scoring — reproducible and inspectable, not AI-generated
  • Crawls up to 25 pages per site, running all engines in parallel
  • PDF, CSV and JSON export for sharing results with a team

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