Product Design and UX

Turn validated evidence and chosen scope into observable behavior people can complete and recover from. Design the interaction, not the brand, pixels, CSS, component implementation, or a particular tool.

Entry Check

Confirm the approved scope, outcome, users or roles, evidence links, constraints, measurable experience goals, and open product decisions. Record missing inputs rather than inventing them.

• Need stakeholder evidence, validation, or raw research? Use product-discovery.
• Need prioritization, scope, or why a feature is being built? Use product-methodology.
• Need WCAG, ARIA, native semantics, or accessibility testing depth? Use web-accessibility.
• Need an approved interaction contract translated into a software specification and delivery gates? Use spec-driven-development.

Workflow

1. Trace each outcome and design decision to evidence with templates/outcomes-to-design.md. Optional personas or jobs must change a decision and cite evidence; do not create decorative demographics.
2. Establish information architecture from goals, content objects, terminology, permissions, findability, and service context. Read references/information-architecture.md.
3. Define consequential labels, instructions, status, errors, and completion content; review the task's memory, choice, switching, interruption, and recovery demands. Use heuristics to generate testable questions, not verdicts. Read references/content-and-cognitive-demand.md.
4. Model important tasks, including forces that create decisions, alternatives, interruption, re-entry, cancellation, recovery, irreversible actions, side effects, permission changes, and completion evidence. Read references/task-flows-and-state-models.md and use templates/task-flow-state-model.md.
5. Inventory only states forced by the flow, data, permissions, connectivity, and risk. Record risky omissions. Use templates/screen-state-inventory.md.
6. Write framework-neutral contracts for content, controls, accessible interaction requirements, actions, transitions, persistence, permissions, responsive/reflow behavior, telemetry, and open decisions. Read references/interface-contracts-and-responsive-behavior.md and use templates/interface-contract.md.
7. Treat patterns as hypotheses. Compare alternatives, tradeoffs, evidence, and disconfirming conditions with references/interaction-pattern-selection.md.
8. Plan or synthesize only authorized usability work. Read references/usability-testing-and-privacy.md; use templates/usability-study.md. Never invent participants, consent, observations, quotes, or results.
9. Produce an engineering handoff with observable acceptance evidence, dependencies, owners, gates, and deployed-boundary verification. Read references/engineering-handoff.md; use templates/engineering-handoff.md. Hand approved behavior to spec-driven-development.

Load On Demand

Need	Load
Scope boundary, traceability, or adjacent-skill routing	references/boundaries-and-traceability.md
Goals, labels, navigation, findability, permissions	references/information-architecture.md
Plain-language content, heuristic review, cognitive demand	references/content-and-cognitive-demand.md
Task paths, state applicability, recovery, side effects	references/task-flows-and-state-models.md
Interaction contract or inclusive responsive behavior	references/interface-contracts-and-responsive-behavior.md
Pattern alternatives and decision evidence	references/interaction-pattern-selection.md
Usability protocol, synthesis, consent, or privacy	references/usability-testing-and-privacy.md
Handoff, acceptance criteria, or deployed verification	references/engineering-handoff.md
Methodology self-check with synthetic fixtures	references/scenario-probes.md
Source authority, status, and examples	references/source-index.md

Guardrails

• Accessibility is designed throughout, but WCAG/ARIA/native-semantics and testing depth remain with web-accessibility.
• Specify behavior under relevant width, zoom/reflow, text expansion/localization, orientation, input modes, reduced motion, degraded connectivity, interruption, and re-entry. Do not use device breakpoints as the model.
• Use synthetic fixtures such as sample-user@example.test and INV-DEMO-042; never request real credentials, payments, financial access, or secrets for an unsafe prototype.
• A finding from usability work is bounded evidence, not accessibility conformance, population prevalence, analytics, or outcome proof.

Completion

Stop when every in-scope behavior has traceable evidence, an applicable state/recovery model, observable acceptance criteria, and either a resolved decision or an owner and resolution gate. Report limitations and untested risks rather than filling gaps with assumptions.