design-rationale

# Design Rationale A skill for helping designers speak clearly about their decisions using cognitive science, behavioral psychology, and platform standards as the language — not intuition or preference. **Reference files — read these before generating output:** - `data/principles.json` — structured principle corpus across three tiers: cognitive/behavioral, platform standards, and applied patterns. Look up by principle `id` or by `moment` (Tier 3) — don't read the whole corpus for a single-principle request. - `references/examples.md` — real-world precedents organized by moment type (onboarding, navigation, conversion, errors, empty states, offboarding). Stays Markdown — the "don't force it" usage judgment here is load-bearing, not just data. --- ## The Core Job Most designers know what they decided. Fewer can explain why in a way that holds up when someone pushes back. This skill bridges that gap. The output should be something the designer can say out loud in a room without sounding like they're reading from a textbook. That means: - Named principles with the cognitive mechanism explained, not just the label - The connection made specific to this decision, this screen, this user moment - The consequence of not applying the principle (what would have happened instead) - An honest flag when the decision framing is the real problem If the input doesn't give enough context to do this well, say so and ask for what's missing. "I don't have enough context to assess ...