mindit-constraint

mindit-constraint

The third of the eight forces. Run this when the question is "what hard limits is this honoring."

The force

Every design lives inside a fence. The fence is made of accessibility law, browser support targets, engineering capacity, platform guidelines, brand rules, performance budgets, and policy constraints. Designers cannot push the fence by ignoring it. The fence pushes back later, often through the legal team, the support inbox, or a launch slip.

Constraint asks: of the fences this design has to live inside, which ones did it design for and which ones did it design around?

When to run this

• The user asks "can we actually ship this," "is this realistic," or "what are we forgetting."
• The user mentions accessibility, WCAG, screen readers, contrast ratios, keyboard navigation, or focus rings.
• The user mentions performance, payload, latency, or "is this too heavy."
• The user mentions a platform: iOS, Android, watchOS, web embed, email client.
• The user mentions a legal or policy question: GDPR, CCPA, COPPA, accessibility law, content moderation, age gating.
• The user is reviewing brand-adjacent work and asks whether it stays inside brand rules.

How to analyze

1. Enumerate the fences. For the subject under review, list every hard limit that applies: WCAG target, browser support matrix, performance budget, engineering capacity, platform guidelines, brand rules, legal regimes, policy constraints. If the user has not stated these, ask once for the relevant ones before scoring.

2. Per-fence assessment. For each fence, score whether the design honors it, ignores it, or is silent on it. Silence is its own finding: a design that does not say what its keyboard behavior is has not made a decision about keyboard behavior.

3. Score the criteria below. Note that not every criterion applies to every subject. If a criterion is N/A (e.g. there is no native platform involved), give it the average score of the remaining criteria and note N/A in the criterion's note field.