Apply foundational design principles: affordances, signifiers, constraints, feedback, and conceptual models. Use when the user mentions "why is this confusing", "affordance", "error prevention", "discoverability", "human-centered design", "fault tolerance", "mental model", "mapping", or "seven stages of action". Also trigger when diagnosing why users make mistakes, reducing product complexity, or improving error messages and feedback systems. Covers the gulfs of execution and evaluation. For usa
The design-everyday-things skill provides a structured framework for analyzing and improving the usability of products by applying foundational human-centered design principles. It is intended to explain why users become confused, make mistakes, or struggle to understand how a system works. Rather than focusing on implementation details or platform-specific guidelines, the skill evaluates how effectively a design bridges the gap between user intentions and product behavior through concepts such as discoverability, affordances, signifiers, constraints, feedback, conceptual models, and the gulfs of execution and evaluation.
Its primary capabilities include assessing designs using a 0-10 usability score with the goal of achieving 10/10 based on discoverability, understandability, and error prevention. The framework emphasizes narrowing the Gulf of Execution by making available actions clear through signifiers, mappings, constraints, and familiar conceptual models, while also narrowing the Gulf of Evaluation through immediate feedback, clear system state indicators, meaningful error messages, and progress indicators. It also encourages evaluating whether users can determine how to use a product quickly without relying on manuals or instructions.
This skill is useful for reviewing or creating interfaces and systems where usability is a priority, including software, physical products, and other human-designed systems. It is particularly relevant when diagnosing user mistakes, reducing product complexity, improving discoverability, refining feedback mechanisms, or strengthening error prevention. Target users include UX practitioners, product designers, developers, researchers, and anyone seeking to apply foundational design principles to create more intuitive and understandable experiences.
Use it when analyzing or improving designs where users experience confusion, errors, poor discoverability, or difficulty understanding system behavior, or when applying foundational human-centered design principles.
No. The framework is described as applicable to physical products, software, and any human-designed system.
It uses a 0-10 scoring approach focused on discoverability, understandability, and error prevention, while providing improvements needed to reach a score of 10/10.
It emphasizes affordances, signifiers, constraints, mappings, feedback, conceptual models, and the gulfs of execution and evaluation as key principles for intuitive design.
The provided content describes a foundational design framework and references separate resources for usability scoring details and iOS-specific patterns rather than presenting platform-specific guidance itself.
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