sector-strategies

name	sector-strategies
description	Use when a website needs an evidence-based sector direction for travel, consulting, education, nonprofit, professional services, portfolio, or another industry without a dedicated skill. Do not use for legal, healthcare, fintech, or ecommerce UX; route those regulated/specialist sectors to their skills.
metadata	{"portable":true,"category":"06-sector-and-domain-ux","compatible_with":["claude-code","codex"]}

Sector Strategies

Acknowledgement: Shared by Peter Bamuhigire, techguypeter.com, [phone].

Use when

• Designing for a specific industry/vertical (tour & travel, corporate/consulting, portfolio, education, e-commerce, professional services, NGO/charity) and you need the sector's trust cues, content priorities, and visual direction — not a generic template.
• You need to make a site read as authentically of its sector while deliberately avoiding the convergent "every-X-site-looks-the-same" look (apply the ANTI-HOMOGENEITY-PRINCIPLE.md).
• Choosing the visual/UX strategy for a sector before the build (pairs with distinctive-by-design).

Do not use when

• The sector is healthcare, legal/fintech, or e-commerce — those have dedicated deeper skills (healthcare-ui-design, legal-sector-ui-ux, fintech-and-financial-product-ui, ecommerce-and-checkout-ux); use this for the sectors they don't cover, or for cross-sector strategy.
• You already have the sector direction and just need to execute UI craft → practical-ui-design, webapp-gui-design; or brand/identity → brand-visual-identity.

Required inputs

Input	Source	Evidence
Sector, offer, audience, geography, and buying context	Client brief and research	Specific segment, alternatives, trust barriers, and decision journey
Authentic proof and available assets	Client/operations records	Projects, people, results, locations, testimonials, and permissions
Regulatory, accessibility, and conversion constraints	Domain owner and delivery team	Verified claims, required disclosures, lead route, and target devices

• The sector/vertical, the audience, and what they actually check before trusting (the trust cues).
• The brand or a deliberate type+colour direction (never a banned font; no default-sector palette).
• The one distinctive move that will keep this site from the sector's homogeneous default.

Workflow

1. Read only the relevant project inputs and preserved guidance before acting.
2. Choose the smallest set of references needed for the current job.
3. Produce the implementation, configuration, or guidance this skill owns.
4. Validate that the result stays compatible with the rest of the repository workflow.

Decision Rules

Condition	Choice	Wrong-choice failure
A dedicated regulated-sector skill exists	Route to it and retain this only for broader context	Generic advice misses safety/legal constraints
Sector trust depends on tangible proof	Lead with authentic evidence and process	Generic visual tropes imitate category without credibility
Organisation spans sectors	Prioritise audience/job and create bounded service branches	Mixing every sector cue creates incoherent identity

Capability Contract

• Must inspect real sector/client evidence; strategy review is read-only unless implementation is requested.
• May produce in-scope direction but may not invent proof, make regulated claims, purchase assets, or publish without client authority.

Degraded Mode

• If sector, audience, offer, or proof is missing, stop final direction and return labelled hypotheses plus research needs.
• Without current regulatory evidence, avoid compliance claims and route to the relevant domain owner. Recover a generic direction by replacing category clichés with verified client-specific proof and rerunning comparison.

Quality Standards

• Outputs must be implementation-ready and internally consistent.
• Preserve existing behavior unless the task explicitly requires a change.
• Avoid host-specific path assumptions so the skill remains portable.

Anti-patterns

• Selecting colours from sector stereotype alone. Correction: derive palette from brand position, context, and accessibility.
• Using generic stock imagery as proof. Correction: prioritise real people, work, place, and outcomes.
• Copying one template across unrelated sectors. Correction: adapt information hierarchy to the buying/task journey.
• Inventing statistics, clients, or testimonials. Correction: use authorised evidence or transparent placeholders.
• Applying this generic router to regulated healthcare, finance, or legal decisions. Correction: activate the dedicated domain skill.
• Do not hardcode .claude/skills or another single install path.
• Do not skip validation against upstream or downstream dependencies.
• Do not generate generic output that ignores the actual project context.

Outputs

Output	Consumer	Evidence and acceptance
Sector strategy brief	Client, content, design	Audience, trust model, hierarchy, proof, visual direction, and exclusions are explicit
Authenticity and quality gate	Approver and QA	Claims/assets trace to sources and sector-specific journeys pass accessibility/conversion review

• Implementation guidance, configuration, generated artifacts, or concrete follow-on steps.

References

• doctrine/design-doctrine.md — the Mission ("the moat is looking human-made") and Anti-Slop Charter; sector authenticity is one route to authored, non-convergent design.
• doctrine/references/ai-slop-taxonomy.md — the convergent-default tells each sector strategy must avoid.
• ANTI-HOMOGENEITY-PRINCIPLE.md (this folder) — why sector templates inform but never dictate the final tokens.
• Sibling skills: 04-web-and-ui-design/distinctive-by-design (commit one distinctive idea per build), 06-sector-and-domain-ux/legal-sector-ui-ux and 06-sector-and-domain-ux/healthcare-ui-design (deeper sector skills), 02-color-brand-and-visual-identity/color-system-and-palette.
• Start with references/legacy-guidance.md for the preserved detailed sector matrix; read only the files under references/ and templates/ that match the current task.

Examples

• examples/sector-strategy-worked.md — a fully reasoned worked strategy for one sector (fintech): trust cues, visual/aesthetic direction, content priorities, and the single anti-homogeneity move that keeps it distinctive. Read it to see how a sector template informs but does not dictate the final design.

Notes

• Treat this SKILL.md as the portable execution layer for both Claude Code and Codex.
• Preserve existing project behavior unless the current task explicitly requires a change.