Standards

Build speed into the system, calm into the experience.

The best product work makes complex systems feel understandable, bounded, and worth trusting. A user should be able to see what is happening, decide what should happen next, and recover when the system needs correction.

Standard statement

Great product work gives people more capability without taking away their judgment.

That requires clear outcomes, visible system behavior, governed automation, evidence for important claims, accessible interaction, and reusable patterns that help quality scale beyond a single review.

Operating rules

These are the standards I would use in critique, product review, implementation review, and release judgment.

Start with the user job

Every flow should make the intended user outcome, context, constraint, and success signal clear before the interface gets clever.

Preserve orientation

The user should always know where they are, what is happening, why it matters, what changed, and what happens next.

Govern consequential action

Autonomy is scoped by risk. External, irreversible, expensive, or reputation-impacting actions need preview, explanation, and explicit approval.

Show evidence for important claims

Recommendations, summaries, rankings, and automated actions should connect to sources, tool output, assumptions, or visible uncertainty.

Design recovery as a primary path

Pause, edit, reject, retry, undo, take over, and recover states are not edge cases. They are how users stay in control.

Ship calm interface craft

The product should feel focused, legible, responsive, and restrained: strong hierarchy, generous spacing, plain language, and no performative complexity.

Make accessibility part of the default

Semantic structure, keyboard paths, labels, contrast, focus states, reduced motion, and readable layouts should be expected before release.

Prefer system fit over one-off polish

When a pattern repeats, it should become a design-system primitive, template, skill, hook, or documented decision.

Quality bar

The bar should be clear enough for designers, engineers, and agents to evaluate work the same way.

Product

The work solves a real user job and names the tradeoff it is making.

Agent behavior

The system exposes plan, scope, evidence, risk, approval, and recovery when autonomy is involved.

Interface

The screen is calm, linear, legible, responsive, accessible, and visually resolved in light and dark modes.

Copy

Language is plain, specific, and useful. It avoids vague AI language and explains risk without drama.

Engineering

States are typed, edge cases are represented, patterns are reusable, and implementation details preserve design intent.

System

The decision either uses the existing system or improves it for the next team member.

Review questions

A lightweight rubric for deciding whether work is ready to ship.

  1. 01Does this solve an explicit user job?
  2. 02Can the user tell what is happening and what happens next?
  3. 03Are consequential actions previewed, explained, and approved?
  4. 04Are important claims supported by evidence or clear uncertainty?
  5. 05Can the user pause, edit, reject, recover, or take over?
  6. 06Does the work hold up across mobile, desktop, light mode, dark mode, keyboard use, and basic accessibility expectations?
  7. 07Does this reuse or improve the design system instead of creating a one-off pattern?
  8. 08Should any decision from this work become a skill, hook, template, or documented standard?

Enforcement

Standards should not depend on memory. They should become part of the way work is created, reviewed, and shipped.

Design system

Reusable primitives, tokens, states, examples, accessibility rules, and interaction patterns.

Skills

Repeatable workflows for design critique, agent UX review, accessibility audit, copy review, and visual polish.

Hooks

Automatic checks for known non-negotiables before work ships.

PR checks

A lightweight release contract for evidence, approval, accessibility, responsive fit, and documented exceptions.

Decision records

Short explanations of why a standard exists, where it applies, and when it should be revisited.