Polish

Built from Emil Kowalski's UI polish and animation skills, Josh Puckett's Interface Craft, and feedback from Charles Liu's "Removing AI Slop" series.

Most work stops at level 3 of 10, because it works and it's easy to stop. The difference between fine and great is rarely the idea; it's how far the idea gets pushed. Most "something feels off" problems are one wrong note, so look, measure and name it before changing anything.

Run it

1. Render it, at its real size and at the smallest size it will be seen. Capture each state and each motion as frames. Measure in the pixels people see: on a scaled stage, a 42 px button may be 37 px on screen.
2. Score it against the anchors below and name the weakest thing on screen in one sentence.
3. Structure: fix hierarchy and containers before details. Polishing the wrong structure is wasted work.
4. States: map every state, including empty, loading, error and success, and design the unhappy ones.
5. Details: run the details table.
6. Motion: walk the three decision trees, then storyboard.
7. Verify frame by frame (below). Nothing is done until you've looked at the frames.
8. Climb: run the loop until two passes in a row find nothing that changes the score.

If you were asked to review and not to change anything, stop before step 8 and report each finding as severity, what's wrong, the evidence (frame, number or file and line) and the fix. High means a state is broken or a promise the screen makes isn't kept. Medium means people notice. Low means only a designer does.