The UX Psychology Audit Checklist

Most website checklists are a hundred items long, which is a way of avoiding the decision about what matters. These fourteen were chosen because each one can be measured rather than argued about, and because each has a cost to the reader that can be stated in a sentence.

They are the checks behind the free audit tool on this site, which you can run against any address in about thirty seconds. This document is everything the tool cannot tell you: why each check exists, what it means when it fails, what it costs the person reading your page, and how to run all fourteen by hand.

It includes the three checks almost every site fails, with the reasons they are missed. Contrast, which is invisible to the designer who knows what the text says. Link text, where the same page has eleven links reading read more. And internal links that redirect, which are a second request the visitor feels as a pause between the tap and anything happening.

Written by an I/O psychologist who also builds the sites. That combination is the reason the examples are measurements from real work rather than principles quoted from a book: a contrast fix that measured as not having happened because a stylesheet was re-declared later in the page, a layout shift confidently predicted and measured at zero, and 89% of a page turning out to be one advertising script.

What it is not: a guarantee about your conversion rate. These fourteen measure a page’s mechanics, not whether the offer is any good.

8 pages, A4, formatted for printing. Delivered as a PDF immediately after payment.