/audit

Most design feedback dies because it arrives as taste. “It feels cluttered” is unarguable and therefore unactionable — the person hearing it can only move things around until you stop saying it.

An audit replaces taste with a list. The point is not to be right; it is to be specific enough to be wrong, so the conversation can move.

Order matters

Go in this order, and stop at the first tier that has findings worth fixing:

1. Does it work — with a mouse, a keyboard, and a thumb. Everything below is decoration if a control is unreachable.
2. Does it hold still — content that shifts as data arrives, numbers that jiggle, hover states that reflow text.
3. Is the hierarchy legible — can someone name the primary action in under a second.
4. Is the spacing systematic — values from a scale, or twelve arbitrary numbers.
5. Is the type comfortable — measure, leading, and whether anything is a fake weight.

Reversing this order is the classic mistake: a beautifully spaced screen with an unreachable submit button has one bug, and it is not the spacing.

Write findings as a diff

A finding is not “the spacing is inconsistent.” A finding is: 24px between the header and the first card, 20px between every card after it — pick one. One line, a location, and the fix. If you cannot write the fix, you have not finished thinking about the problem.