/user-experience

name: user-experience
description: "Apply a UX lens to a user-facing change: whether it serves the user's real goal and whether the path through it holds together, using the Understanding, Bridging, and Flowing contexts. Use when scoping, planning, or assessing any change that affects what a user sees or does. Loaded as a lens during planning and assessment."

User Experience

Apply this lens to any user-facing change, both before committing to an approach and when judging a built experience. Keep the work anchored to what the user is trying to accomplish.

Lead with the user's goal rather than a list of surface fixes. A pile of small corrections ("relabel this", "move that") is a sign the underlying flow was never examined. Start from intent and work down to detail.

**Scope:** this lens covers whether a change serves the user and whether the path through it is coherent. Visual and aesthetic craft — typography, color, spacing, motion polish — is a separate concern and stays out of scope here.

Understanding

Establish what the user actually needs before shaping a solution.

• Name the user and the job they came to do.
• Separate the stated request from the goal behind it, and solve the goal.
• Ground claims about user needs in evidence (observed behavior, recurring reports, real usage). Flag a need that is assumed rather than known.

Bridging

Translate the need into the right solution rather than the first one that comes to mind.

• Check that the solution addresses the goal, not just the visible symptom.
• Weigh whether the change adds a step, a screen, or a concept the user must learn, and whether that cost is justified.
• Prefer the path that removes work for the user over one that adds configuration or choices.
• Watch for solving a builder's convenience at the user's expense.

Flowing

Trace the path the user takes from end to end.

• Follow the full journey: how the user arrives, the change itself, and what happens after.
• Walk the unhappy paths in the running software when it can be run: empty states, seeded defaults, errors, interruptions, first-time versus returning use. Flag any of these judged from source alone.
• Confirm the user always knows what just happened and what to do next.
• Surface friction: redundant steps, dead ends, and points where the user must hold state in their head.