// Use when setting design direction — establishing principles, competitive positioning, experience mapping, or aligning stakeholders on what the design should achieve and why
MUST run before any other Designpowers skill — shows welcome, checks taste profile, and routes to the correct first skill. Triggers on ANY design-related message. No other Designpowers skill may run until the welcome sequence has completed
You MUST use this before any creative or design work — building features, creating components, designing interfaces, modifying user-facing behaviour. Explores intent, constraints, users, and context before any design decisions are made
Use when starting a new project or when taste decisions are made — accumulates the user's aesthetic preferences, recurring patterns, and design instincts across projects so each new project starts with what the system already knows about their taste
Use when any Designpowers agent starts work or completes work — maintains the shared design state file that all agents read from and write to. Invoke to initialise, read, or update the living design state document
Use when calibrating aesthetic direction — capturing design references, quality benchmarks, and the subjective qualities that make a design feel elevated. Invoked between strategy and design to give agents a shared sense of what "good" looks and feels like for this project
Use after the fix round to validate the design by walking through key tasks as each persona — simulating how Jordan (low-vision), Priya (non-native speaker), Marcus (motor impairment), or any project persona would actually experience the interface. Catches the issues that code review misses because they only surface in the act of using
| name | design-strategy |
| description | Use when setting design direction — establishing principles, competitive positioning, experience mapping, or aligning stakeholders on what the design should achieve and why |
Strategy is the bridge between understanding and making. It takes what you learned in discovery and research and turns it into a clear direction that every design decision can be measured against.
BEFORE running strategy, check whether the Designpowers welcome sequence has been shown this session. If the user has not yet seen the welcome (the bird, the greeting, and the walkthrough offer), you MUST invoke the using-designpowers skill FIRST and complete the welcome sequence before returning here. The bird must appear before any work begins. No exceptions.
Gather everything from previous phases:
If relevant, map the competitive landscape:
## Competitive Analysis
| Competitor | Strengths | Weaknesses | Accessibility | Differentiation Opportunity |
|-----------|-----------|------------|---------------|---------------------------|
| [Name] | [What works] | [What fails] | [WCAG compliance, inclusive design quality] | [Where we can do better] |
Pay specific attention to where competitors fail on accessibility — this is often the largest opportunity for differentiation.
Write 3-5 design principles that will guide every decision. Good principles are:
Example format:
### [Principle Name]
**The principle:** [One sentence]
**What this means in practice:** [How this guides decisions]
**What this means we will NOT do:** [What this rules out]
Map the end-to-end experience:
For each moment, note the emotional state and the inclusive design considerations.
How will we know the design is working?
| Metric | What It Measures | Target | How to Measure |
|---|---|---|---|
| [Metric] | [What aspect of the experience] | [Goal] | [Method] |
Include at least one accessibility metric (e.g., task completion rate with assistive technology, WCAG compliance level, cognitive load score).
# Design Strategy: [Project Name]
## Design Principles
[3-5 principles]
## Competitive Position
[Where we differentiate]
## Experience Map
[End-to-end journey with emotional states]
## Success Metrics
[How we measure impact]
## Constraints and Trade-offs
[What we are choosing NOT to optimise for, and why]
Save to: docs/designpowers/strategy/YYYY-MM-DD-<project>-strategy.md
Present the strategy section by section. Confirm alignment before proceeding to design plans.
design-discoverywriting-design-plans| Flag | Response |
|---|---|
| Principles that nobody could disagree with ("Make it easy to use") | Rewrite. If everyone agrees, it is not guiding decisions |
| No accessibility principle | Add one. Inclusive design is a strategic advantage, not a compliance checkbox |
| Strategy without constraints | Every strategy involves trade-offs. Name them explicitly |