Audience Experience Design

Audience Experience Design

Design how an audience will experience an artifact — before a line of it is built. This skill turns who the audience is, what they came to do, and how they should feel into concrete, buildable design decisions that a platform skill can implement. It is medium-neutral at the contract layer and works for websites, web apps, dashboards, business reports, and any user-facing flow.

Design decides; the platform renders. Every section below must end in a decision — an ordered content choice, a component/interaction/state, a layout or token-role choice, or a measurable acceptance criterion. If a section is only principles, it is not doing this skill's job.

1. Overview, Routing & the Boundary Invariant

BOUNDARY INVARIANT (load-bearing). This skill owns the medium-neutral experience contract and the currently-unowned mediums: apps, business reports, and generic user journeys. Where a medium skill already owns the journey, this skill produces the upstream brief and HANDS OFF — it never re-derives an owned flow. Specifically, it does not re-derive:

• deck / slide flows → owned by presentation-narrative;
• the commerce funnel → owned by ecommerce-growth;
• persuasion copy → owned by conversion-psychology;
• built-interface review → owned by ux-reviewer (this skill designs; that skill reviews the built result).

The decision this section produces — own vs hand off. For the artifact in front of you, classify each part: does a medium skill already own this journey? If yes, write the brief (audience, intent, desired response, acceptance criteria) and route to that owner. If no (a business report, an app flow, a generic journey), this skill owns it end-to-end. Record the routing decision explicitly before designing — it determines which sections below you author versus hand off.

2. Audience Model

Produce a named audience model, scoped per audience type (do not design for a mythical average user):

• Type & job — who they are and the concrete job they came to do ("finance reviewer approving a variance", "first-time shopper comparing two products", "on-call engineer triaging an alert").
• Prior knowledge & vocabulary — what they already know; which terms to use and which to define. This decides labels and the level of explanation.
• Context — device, environment, time pressure, attention budget. A report read in a Monday review meeting and a dashboard watched during an incident are different design problems.
• "Feeling understood" — made concrete per type. State the specific signal that makes THIS audience feel the artifact was built for them (e.g. the finance reviewer sees the variance and its driver in the first screen without scrolling; the shopper sees the one fact that resolves their comparison). This is a design decision, not an adjective.
• Desired action + emotional/trust constraint — the single primary action and the trust state required to take it (confidence, safety, urgency-without- pressure).

Decision produced: the audience type(s), their vocabulary, and the concrete "understood" signal each must receive — which constrains labels, content, and tone downstream.

3. Journey / Reading Path

Design the ordered path through the artifact — entry, transitions, states, completion — for the chosen medium:

• Apps / flows: the task path step by step, plus the error, empty, and loading states for each step (an app design that omits these is unbuildable). Decide what the user can do next at each step and what happens when it fails.
• Business reports (a medium this skill OWNS): the reading order and the two paths — the executive path (headline → verdict → one supporting fact) and the deep path (methodology, detail, appendix). Decide which fact leads, what an executive can skip, and where the deep reader enters.
• Drift guard — reports are NOT decks. Business reports are an unowned medium this skill takes. Slide/deck flows are NOT — those stay in presentation-narrative. If the artifact is a slide sequence, write the brief and hand off. Stated here in-body to prevent authoring drift.

Decision produced: the ordered path and its per-step states (or the report's reading order and executive-vs-deep split).

4. Information Architecture & Attention Hierarchy

Decide what the audience sees first, next, and last, and why:

• Content ordering — rank the content blocks by the audience's job, not by the org chart or the data model.
• Attention hierarchy — exactly one primary focus per view; everything else is secondary or tertiary. Decide the single thing the eye should land on first.
• Progressive disclosure — what is shown by default versus revealed on demand. Decide the default-visible set and the on-demand set; hiding the wrong thing is as costly as showing too much.

Decision produced: the ranked content order, the single primary focus per view, and the default-visible vs on-demand split.

5. Buildable Specification

Turn the above into a spec precise enough to hand to a platform skill:

• Components & states — name each component and enumerate its states (default, hover/focus, active, disabled, loading, empty, error). A component without its states is not yet buildable.
• Wireframe intent — the layout regions and their relationship (what is fixed, what scrolls, what stacks on small screens), described as regions and priorities rather than pixel positions.
• Ergonomics & ease-of-use — apply Fitts- and Hick-level reasoning as decisions: make the primary action large and reachable; reduce the number of choices at each decision point; keep related controls together; specify keyboard and touch affordances (focus order, hit-target sizing intent, no hover-only actions on touch).

Decision produced: the component/state inventory, the layout-region priorities, and the ergonomic choices (target prominence, choice count, input modalities).

6. Semantic Token & Layout Brief (the Token Seam)

This skill DECIDES token semantics; platform skills IMPLEMENT them. Design decides, platform renders. The brief names token roles, scale intent, and usage rules in a medium-neutral, semantic vocabulary. It must contain no platform syntax — name what a token is for, never how a framework spells it. The platform owner (named in the handoff table) maps each role to its own mechanism (a design-token preset layer, a custom-property layer, or utility classes); that mapping is the platform's job, never written here.

Author the brief as roles and intent, for example (in words, not code):

• Color roles — name by role and emphasis: a primary-action role (the single highest-emphasis accent, used only for the one primary action per view); a neutral surface role and a raised-surface role; primary and muted text roles; and status roles (success, warning, danger). Give each a usage rule ("the primary-action role appears at most once per view").
• Type scale — a small ordered set by role (display, heading levels, body as the reading baseline, caption one step down and lower-emphasis). Decide the reading baseline and the steps around it, not point sizes.
• Spacing rhythm — one spacing scale named by role (tight inset, inset, stack gap, section gap) so rhythm is consistent; decide the roles, not the values.
• Elevation / emphasis — the ordered levels of prominence (flat, raised, overlay) and which content earns each.

Layering note (medium-neutrality, answers the obvious objection). The audience, journey, and IA layers (§§2-4) are genuinely medium-neutral — the same contract serves a web page, an app, or a report. The buildable-spec and token layers (§§5-6) are produced for the chosen medium against that medium's constraints: what is neutral is the contract, not the final spec. A token brief for a report and for a web app share the same role vocabulary but resolve to different platform mechanisms.

Decision produced: the named semantic token roles, their scale intent, and per-role usage rules — handed to the platform owner to implement.

7. Acceptance Criteria

State the measurable checks the built artifact must pass — these feed ux-reviewer for the post-build review:

• Comprehension — a member of the target audience can state the artifact's main point / find the primary action within a set time (e.g. the 5-second test) without help.
• Task success — the primary task completes without a dead end; every error state has a recovery path.
• Engagement — a medium-appropriate, measurable signal (report: the executive path answers the question on the first screen; app: the primary action is reachable within N interactions).
• Accessibility — keyboard-reachable primary flow, visible focus, sufficient contrast, labelled controls (WCAG AA as the floor).

Decision produced: the concrete pass/fail criteria the build is measured against.

8. Medium Handoff Table

Once the contract is designed, hand off to the owner that implements it:

9. Anti-Patterns