Pre-Launch App UI Audit
A visual and UI teardown of your app — hierarchy, type, polish, dark mode.
A prioritised list of UI/visual issues (P0–P3) with the exact fix for each.
Visual quality dies by a thousand small allowances, so this council pairs the Visual Designer and the Creative Director — one auditing the craft detail by detail, the other judging whether the whole reads as one intentional product. Steve Jobs sits on the panel for a single reason: the refusal to accept “good enough”. The QA Auditor sweeps the states polish reviews skip — dark mode, error, loading — and the Accessibility Advocate stops beautiful-but-unreadable from shipping.
We are about to launch and need an exacting visual / UI audit. Treat this like an Apple-grade design review — zero tolerance for sloppy edges. SCREENS / CONTEXT: [paste your screens or design files, or describe the UI in detail] BRAND / DESIGN SYSTEM: [link or describe your tokens — colours, type scale, spacing, voice] PLATFORM: [iOS / Android / web / all] Debate the visual design across these dimensions, citing specific elements: 1. Visual hierarchy — does the eye land on the right thing first; are primary and secondary actions clearly ranked. 2. Spacing & layout — consistent rhythm and grid; padding/margins; alignment; any cramped or floating elements. 3. Typography — scale, weight, line length, line height, hierarchy; any orphan/widow or truncation issues. 4. Colour & contrast — palette discipline, semantic colour use, accessible contrast ratios, no off-brand colours. 5. Dark mode — every screen and state correct in dark mode (this is not optional). 6. Motion — transitions and feedback that serve the UX, 60fps, respects reduced-motion; flag anything gratuitous. 7. Iconography & imagery — consistent style, weight and resolution; no pixelation or mixed metaphors. 8. Brand consistency — does it feel like one intentional product, or assembled from defaults. 9. Sloppy edges — misalignment, inconsistent corner radii, unthemed components, janky touch states, default system UI leaking through. FINAL SYNTHESIS must deliver: - A prioritised list, each item with: severity (P0–P3), the exact screen/element, what is wrong, and the precise fix (e.g. "increase to 16pt spacing", "drop to one accent colour here"). - A short "what is already excellent" list so we keep what works. - A verdict: is the visual craft at launch quality, yes or no, and the 3 changes that move it there.
An illustrative excerpt for a hypothetical brief of this type: A solo founder is about to launch a finance dashboard with a custom dark theme, three accent colours and typography assembled from two different component libraries. Every real run is generated fresh from your specifics, debated across rounds, and audited before the verdict.
Three accents is two too many for a data product. The green means “profit” on the chart but “success” on the toasts and “primary action” on the buttons — the same colour is doing three jobs, so it does none. Pick one semantic per colour and rebuild the palette from that rule.
Nobody will list the fonts, but everyone will feel them. The numbers table is set in a different face to the cards beside it, and the whole screen whispers “assembled, not designed”. Choose one type family, one scale, and delete the second library this week — that is the launch decision.
I checked the states, not the screenshots: the loading skeleton flashes white in dark mode, the error toast is unthemed system default, and the empty portfolio state still has placeholder copy. None of this appears in the happy path the founder has been staring at for months.
Disagreeing on priority: the colour-semantics fix matters more than the font consolidation, because a finance user who misreads green will mistrust the product, while mixed type is merely unlovely. If only one ships before launch, ship the palette rule.
Prefer drop-and-go? Use the AI UI Design Review tool — team pre-seated, included with Plus.
Can the council really judge visuals — do I paste screenshots?
Yes — attach screenshots or exports of the actual screens, ideally including dark mode and one error or empty state. The critique cites specific elements (“the toast”, “the numbers table”), not abstractions. Text descriptions work too, but the review is only as concrete as what you show it.
What if my design is fine and I just need confidence?
Then the verdict says so — the brief explicitly asks for a “what is already excellent” list and a yes/no on launch-quality craft, and the house rules forbid inventing issues to pad a list. A clean pass with two P3 nits is a legitimate, and common, outcome.
UI or UX audit — which one do I run first?
UX first if users get lost, UI first if the product works but feels cheap. The UX audit interrogates flows, states and friction; this one interrogates hierarchy, type, colour, spacing and polish. Teams close to launch often run both and merge the two P0 lists into one punch list.