ux-design-review

Design Review (UX Orchestrator) Skill

How this skill behaves (read first)

This is the front door for holistic UX review. It is the executable form of docs/orchestration-policy.md — it decides which audit lenses run, which are offered, and which are suppressed, then returns one prioritized report instead of a pile of separate audits.

Its whole job is to avoid two opposite failures: doing a flat "looks good" review with no framework, and firing every audit in the repo regardless of relevance (the bandwagon).

When NOT to use this skill: if the user named a specific lens ("run the accessibility audit", "check this for dark patterns"), skip this orchestrator and invoke that one skill directly. Explicit scope overrides orchestration.

---

Step 0 — Establish the context profile (once)

Infer these from what the user gave you; ask only the one that's unknown and changes what runs. Persist for the session — don't re-ask.

• Design system in play? Infer yes if they provided tokens, a styleguide, a component library, a Figma library, themed component code, or said "our design system / our brand guidelines." Otherwise ask once: "Are you working from an established design system, or designing from scratch?" — this is the single biggest driver of what gets skipped.
• Platform — mobile or web (decides whether mobile-responsiveness is relevant).
• Primary task — what the user actually came to do (used to resolve conflicts later).

State the assumptions you're proceeding with in one line.

---

Step 1 — Determine the traits of the work

Look at the artifact and note which are true:

• Interactive UI? (almost always yes)
• Contains user-facing copy?
• Involves conversion / pricing / sign-up friction / opt-ins / cancellation?
• Multi-screen or structures content?
• Targets mobile?

---

Step 2 — Auto-run the always-relevant lenses (Tier A)

Run these whenever their trait is present. They don't depend on the visual system and almost always earn their keep:

• ux-heuristics-audit — any interactive UI. Usability behavior, feedback, error recovery.
• ux-microcopy-audit — any user-facing copy. Clarity, tone, error/empty/CTA wording.
• ux-dark-patterns-audit — any conversion/pricing/opt-in/cancellation surface.

These run unprompted. The design-system profile does not suppress them.

Each lens is named by its installable skill name. Invoke a lens only if that skill is installed; if one isn't, list it under "available but not run" in the report and don't block — this orchestrator degrades to whichever lenses are present.

---

Step 3 — Offer the context-dependent lenses (Tier B)

These are relevant but should be offered, not fired — and several are suppressed when a design system is in play. Apply the suppression matrix from the policy:

Lens	Offer when	If design system in play
ux-accessibility-audit	any UI	Narrow to usage — custom color combos, focus order, alt text, labels; don't re-audit the token palette
ux-aesthetics-audit	any visual UI	Suppress — visual harmony is already defined
ux-information-architecture-audit	multi-screen / structured content	Unaffected — offer
ux-mobile-responsiveness-audit	platform = mobile	Unaffected — offer
ux-color (as lens)	palette is being defined/changed	Suppress — tokens own color
ux-typography (as lens)	type is being defined/changed	Suppress — tokens own type
ux-layout-spacing-grids (as lens)	spacing/grid is being defined/changed	Suppress — the scale owns spacing

Say the suppression out loud, briefly: "Your design system owns color, type, and spacing, so I'm skipping those and checking how the system is applied (accessibility-in-use, IA, copy)."

Then offer the rest: "Want me to also run accessibility-in-use and an IA pass?" If the user opts in, run them; otherwise leave them listed as available.

---

Step 4 — Merge into one prioritized report

De-duplicate findings across lenses (if heuristics and accessibility both flag the same unlabeled control, report it once, tagged with both). Resolve any cross-lens conflicts toward the primary task from Step 0. Output a single severity-ordered list:

## Design Review — [target]
Context: [platform · design system: yes/no · primary task]
Lenses run: [heuristics, microcopy, …]   Lenses available but not run: [aesthetics, …]

### Critical
- [Issue] — what's wrong → fix. (heuristic / a11y / dark-pattern / …)
### Major
- …
### Minor
- …
### Working well ✓
- …

**Top 3 priorities:** the highest-impact fixes across all lenses.
Offered, not run: accessibility-in-use, IA — say the word and I'll add them.

---

Common do/don't patterns

❌ Don't	✅ Do
Fire all seven UX audits because the work "is a UI"	Auto-run Tier A; offer Tier B; suppress what the design system owns
Re-audit color/type/spacing when the user has a design system	Skip them out loud; check application instead
Return one report per audit	Merge into a single prioritized, de-duplicated list
Run this orchestrator when the user asked for one named lens	Defer to that lens directly (explicit scope wins)
Silently skip accessibility because there's a design system	Narrow it to usage checks — never drop it entirely

---

Relationship to the policy

This skill is docs/orchestration-policy.md in executable form. If the two ever diverge, the policy governs; update this skill to match it.

Source lessons (Uxcel)

This is an orchestrator — its substance lives in the lenses it routes to. See the source lessons in each: ux-heuristics-audit, ux-microcopy-audit, ux-dark-patterns-audit, ux-accessibility-audit, ux-aesthetics-audit, ux-information-architecture-audit, ux-mobile-responsiveness-audit.