Experience Design Specification

Experience Design Specification

Specify how people understand and accomplish a bounded task. Produce a usable design proposal whose choices, evidence, and unresolved dependencies are visible.

Preserve scope and authority

• Inspect available product evidence, existing screens, behavior, design systems, content, constraints, and prior decisions before asking questions. Distinguish observed behavior from accepted intent and proposed improvements.
• Work read-only by default and return inline. Use an existing design or change record when writing is authorized; do not create a parallel specification.
• Identify the intended users, circumstances, outcome, design decision owner, and constraints. Missing user research limits confidence; it does not prevent a labeled design hypothesis or justify invented personas and findings.
• Preserve accepted domain, security, privacy, and operational rules. Propose how their effects are communicated; do not settle disputed rules through UI defaults or promise capabilities the system does not support.
• Design authority does not authorize implementation, customer contact, experiments, publication, or a claim that the experience is validated.
• Match depth to the decision. For a small clear label or spacing change, give the direct recommendation or route authorized execution without a full spec.

Design workflow

1. Frame the task. Name who is trying to do what, where they start, what they know, and how they recognize completion. Recover the underlying task even when the request names a screen. Keep accepted constraints intact. Identify target environments and the input, window, access, connectivity, and interruption conditions that can change the task. Do not infer native behavior from screen size or assume desktop means mouse-only. Recover missing consequential context or keep dependent choices conditional. Read references/platform-adaptation.md when native navigation, lifecycle, multiple surfaces, or adaptive layouts matter, before choosing the flow. Omit dimensions that do not affect this decision.
2. Recover the current experience. Trace the relevant entry, decisions, actions, feedback, and exit from available evidence. Inspect rendered screens when available and relevant; state when only code, documents, or descriptions were inspected. Include meaningful interruptions and cross-surface handoffs.
3. Clarify the user-facing concepts. Name each concept's purpose, visible state, actions, and a short scenario connecting action to outcome. Check overloaded purposes, inconsistent terminology, missing reversals, and surprising coupled effects. Route disputed business meaning to domain-modeling; preserve its accepted rules in the experience.
4. Compare material alternatives. Where a consequential choice is open, compare plausible flows or representations against the same task and constraints. Explain differences in comprehension, effort, control, and recovery. Do not manufacture alternatives for an already settled detail. For a consequential choice, connect what the person must perceive and understand to their decision, the action's state change, and the feedback that lets them verify the outcome. Use this explanation to justify the choice; familiarity with a pattern alone is insufficient.
5. Specify the proposed flow. Show the smallest self-contained flow, state table, or annotated wireframe that makes the design inspectable. Label current, proposed, preserved, and unresolved elements. Connect entry, actions, transitions, completion, and the branches that can change the design. Across environments, preserve shared task and concept invariants while making consequential differences in navigation, input, layout, and continuity explicit. Use the same flow or table; do not add a platform matrix unless it exposes a missing decision. Consistency does not require identical controls.
6. Design information and interaction together. Put needed comparisons and consequences where the user makes the decision. Specify primary and supporting information, labels, control purpose, and feedback. Reuse available patterns and primitives; explain departures. Reduce unnecessary navigation without hiding necessary context or removing deliberate user control.
7. Resolve meaningful states. Specify what users see, can do, and retain during relevant loading, empty, validation, failure, permission, interruption, and success states. Distinguish unavailable data from an empty result and pending work from completion. Describe cancel, retry, undo, or re-entry only where supported or explicitly proposed; identify dependent system decisions.
8. Check access and context. Specify applicable keyboard navigation, visible focus and focus return, reading order, accessible names, status feedback, and alternatives to pointer-only interaction. Explain how hierarchy and task access survive relevant narrow layouts and content variation. Read references/interaction-checks.md for web forms, composite controls, dynamic feedback, or responsive layouts. Apply the target platform's access conventions for native experiences; do not claim conformance from a specification or screenshot.
9. Challenge the design. Walk representative success and failure scenarios through the proposal. Ask whether a problem comes from the task framing, conceptual model, presentation, or implementation. Keep designer walkthroughs distinct from observed user evidence. Name the smallest next observation that could overturn a consequential assumption; route its execution when needed. Exercise the context changes that threaten the proposed behavior, such as Back, resize, input changes, interruption, or window close. Check both what changes and what remains intact; a static layout comparison cannot establish continuity. Select only relevant probes rather than a fixed device inventory.
10. State disposition. Return a proposed design ready for owner review, a conditional proposal, or a blocked dependent slice. Identify what is accepted, proposed, assumed, and unresolved; give each consequential unknown an owner, consequence, and next decision. Do not mark unresolved behavior ready merely because every screen has been drawn.

Compose without duplicate ownership

• product-opportunity-discovery owns customer opportunity, value, adoption, and usability hypotheses and their research evidence. This skill owns the experience proposal those hypotheses inform. Return contrary design evidence to discovery without rerunning opportunity selection for every flow.
• software-change-specification owns the broader behavior delta and readiness of a bounded software change. It consumes accepted experience decisions; neither owner maintains a second copy of the other's authoritative contract.
• architecture-surface-mapping connects the experience to operations, systems, data, and owners. This skill proposes the user experience, not that topology.
• prototype-to-learn builds an authorized disposable artifact for a named design uncertainty. Supply the question, candidate behavior, and fidelity limits; use returned observations to revise the proposal.
• specification-review independently checks a fixed proposal's integrity; it does not establish usability or accessibility. Route engineering evidence methods and execution to software-verification and maintained changes to scoped-change-implementation.
• Keep domain meaning with domain-modeling and threat/control decisions with software-security-design. An unresolved specialist decision blocks only the dependent design slice. State missing owners rather than inventing policy.

Reject weak results

• Reject a screen inventory without a task path or a happy path that conceals consequential state, permissions, external effects, or recovery obligations.
• Do not use visual polish, fewer clicks, familiar widgets, or passing mechanical checks as proof of comprehension, task success, or accessibility.
• Do not infer operational behavior from a static mockup or claim user testing from a designer walkthrough. Keep illustrative content labeled.
• Keep product language about the user's task. Expose implementation detail only when it helps the user make a meaningful decision.
• Do not turn this workflow into a universal UX audit, brand system, research program, implementation plan, or mandatory document template.

Completion

Return the task frame, evidence limits, inspectable proposed experience, decision rationale, material interaction and access behavior, and disposition. Include consequential environment differences and continuity expectations. Include alternatives and open decisions only where they change the design. Distinguish owner acceptance, design confidence, and observed validation.