Designing User Experiences

Minimize cognitive load without sacrificing capability, agency, context, or recovery. Ground decisions in the product's actual users, workflows, platform, design system, and constraints. Apply Apple-derived principles through target-platform conventions rather than copying platform-specific controls or metrics.

Do not invent research, business rules, capabilities, defaults, frequency, risk, success claims, or implementation constraints. Label assumptions and unknowns; preserve current behavior where evidence is incomplete.

Route by Scope and Request

• Bounded surface: a screen, component, form, dashboard, local navigation area, or contained workflow whose behavior and ownership are already understood. Follow the requested Proposal, Review, or Implementation mode without imposing an extra approval gate.
• Substantial experience: product-level information architecture, navigation model, multi-surface workflow, state model, capability classification, or redesign with material behavior, compatibility, persistence, or recovery decisions. Produce a proposal first and do not edit product files until the user explicitly approves it.

Ask one focused question only when a missing product decision blocks safe work. Otherwise preserve uncertain behavior and identify the unresolved decision.

Establish Context

For a new product, inspect available briefs, research, requirements, domain rules, platform conventions, technical constraints, and accessibility requirements. Identify intended user groups, jobs, proposed capabilities, dependencies, cancellation and recovery paths, and measurable outcomes without implying that unbuilt behavior exists.

For an existing product, inspect the relevant interface, code, tests, user-facing documentation, stored formats, supported widths and inputs, accessibility conventions, and design system. Identify current users and jobs, inventory capabilities before simplifying, and map current paths, states, dependencies, cancellation, recovery, and compatibility requirements.