Building My First Chrome Extension as a UI/UX Designer
I never thought I’d end up building a Chrome extension.
My background is UI/UX design. I’ve spent years focusing on layouts, flows, and making products feel intuitive. Not writing code. Not shipping extensions.
But this one came from a very real, very annoying problem.
The problem
I chat a lot with people from the US, UK, and other countries.
And honestly, sometimes I’m not 100% confident with my English.
So my workflow looked like this:
- Type a message
- Copy it
- Paste it into my CustomGPT grammar agent
- Wait for the fix
- Copy it again
- Paste it back into WhatsApp / Upwork / wherever
It works. But it’s slow. And it breaks the flow of conversation.
After doing this hundreds of times, it started to feel… dumb.
There had to be a better way.
The idea
Instead of jumping between tools, why not bring the grammar assistant directly into where I type?
That’s where Quill came from.
A simple Chrome extension that lets me fix my grammar instantly without leaving the page.
How Quill works
The idea is intentionally simple:
- Type normally (WhatsApp Web, Upwork, anywhere)
- Highlight the sentence
- Click “Fix Grammar”
- See the improved version with clear changes
- Accept or dismiss
No tab switching. No copy-paste loop.
Just write ? fix ? continue.
Behind the scenes
Quill is powered by Claude Sonnet 4.6.
And the interesting part is… I didn’t build this like a traditional developer.
I used Claude Code to guide me through the entire process:
- structuring the extension
- handling text selection
- injecting UI into web pages
- connecting the AI
I’m still a UI/UX designer at heart. But this project pushed me into actually building something functional.
What this really means
This wasn’t just about fixing grammar.
It was about removing friction from something I do every single day.
And more importantly, it changed how I see my own skillset.
I’m no longer just designing interfaces.
I can now turn small annoyances into actual products.
