design-ux

design-ux is a skill for Claude Code from connerkward/ckw-design-skill. It costs 112 tokens per session (1,549 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A usability review guide for interactive user interfaces, such as editors, tools, and apps. It checks how easily a first-time user can complete the main task, not just how the interface looks.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review a rendered interface, walk through its main task, and assess it against Nielsen's ten usability guidelines.
Why use it?
It finds confusing instructions, difficult interactions, and other problems that can make an interface hard to use.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions subagents.

Part of the ckw-design plugin — 7 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to review a rendered interface, walk through its main task, and assess it against Nielsen's ten usability guidelines.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/connerkward/ckw-design-skill/design-ux
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add connerkward/ckw-design-skill --skill design-ux
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/connerkward/ckw-design-skill

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install ckw-design, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 7 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for design-ux

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/connerkward/ckw-design-skill/design-ux.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/connerkward/ckw-design-skill/design-ux)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/connerkward/ckw-design-skill/design-ux"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/connerkward/ckw-design-skill/design-ux.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 112 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,549 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00112 $0.01549
Opus 5 $0.00056 $0.00775
Sonnet 5 $0.00022 $0.00310
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00155

Measured 8d ago against content hash 46781b7d9927, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

design-ux scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 8d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

Copies of this mod

3 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

deterministic-design/design-ux/SKILL.md · 59 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 59 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

design-ux — usability audit (heuristic evaluation)

Usability ≠ aesthetics. design-system/design-spatial make it look right; this checks whether a first-timer can do the task without being told how. Use it whenever a UI "sucks to use," needs a paragraph of instructions, or before shipping anything interactive.

Rule 0 — fresh eyes, on the rendered artifact (inherited from design-spatial §1)

Never self-grade. The builder rationalizes its own UI. Render the live UI in its default first-load state (not a hand-arranged screenshot), capture an interaction trace of the primary task, and have a separate judge (a subagent/VLM that did NOT build it) score it. A described list of changes is not an audit — the audit is a fresh judge hunting for what's wrong on the real screen.

The procedure

  1. Name the primary task(s) the UI exists for (e.g. "trim a clip and set its speed, then export"). The audit is relative to these, not to abstract prettiness.
  2. Render default state + trace the task. Screenshot the first-load UI (wide AND narrow — overflow gate from design-spatial §2). Then actually perform the primary task and screenshot each step.
  3. Score every heuristic (table below) on the artifact: pass / violation, severity (blocker / major / minor), a specifically located finding, and a concrete fix. Separate judge does this.
  4. Prioritize: blockers → majors → minors; cluster fixes that touch the same surface.
  5. Fix, then RE-RENDER and RE-SCORE. Do not claim fixed without re-auditing the new artifact (verify-outputs-rule).

Heuristics — score each (Nielsen's 10, 1994) + interaction add-ons

# Heuristic (Nielsen) What to check in THIS UI
1 Visibility of system status Every action has visible feedback; current state/selection/mode always legible; progress for slow ops.
2 Match the real world Known metaphors & conventions (e.g. NLE: clips, trim handles, playhead) — not bespoke gestures users must learn.
3 User control & freedom Undo/redo, cancel, clear exits from any state; reversible by default.
4 Consistency & standards Same thing looks/behaves the same; platform conventions (⌘Z, Delete, drag-to-move) honored.
5 Error prevention Invalid states made impossible; destructive actions confirmed or trivially undoable.
6 Recognition over recall Options/affordances visible — no memorizing. An instruction wall is a failure of this heuristic: if you must explain scroll-to-zoom / drag-edge / double-click in prose, the affordance is missing.
7 Flexibility & efficiency Defaults carry novices; shortcuts/accelerators for experts; sensible first-run with nothing configured.
8 Aesthetic & minimalist Signal over chrome; no irrelevant elements competing; the primary surface carries the most visual weight.
9 Recognize/diagnose/recover from errors Plain-language errors (not raw stderr), and a path out.
10 Help & documentation Rarely needed if 1–9 hold; task-oriented, in-context, not a top-of-page lecture.

Read the full file on GitHub · 59 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 8d ago First seen · 59 lines · 112 tokens per session scan A 46781b7d9927

Subscribe to this mod's changes

design-ux is a skill published in the GitHub repository connerkward/ckw-design-skill (6 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 112 tokens to every session and 1,549 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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