audit-ux-journeys

audit-ux-journeys — User-Story, Task-Completion & IA Audit

Degree of freedom: MIXED — Story derivation, IA, and evidence tags [HIGH freedom]; Phase 2 headed walkthrough [LOW freedom — run exactly].

A site can pass every per-page heuristic and still fail: pages clean, yet nobody can find the feature, checkout takes nine steps with two dead ends, and nav follows the database schema. audit-ux judges pages; this skill judges paths and structure.

The 2026 consensus: a UX audit is not personal taste. Derive stories from the product, walk the journeys, audit IA against mental models, and ground findings in behavioral evidence when it exists. Pre-launch: qualitative walkthroughs, labeled as assumptions.

Before ANY browser interaction, read protocol-browser-anti-stall and apply its rules to every step.

Report-first. Prioritized audit, then delegate: per-page heuristics/ microcopy → audit-ux · single-screen → enhance-web-ux · forms → enhance-web-forms · WCAG → audit-accessibility · speed → audit-performance · feature parity → audit-realworld. Owns the cross-page journey and IA layer.

Core principle — stories over pages, data over taste

• The unit of audit is a story, not a screen. Every finding attaches to a user story and a step in its path.
• Derive stories from the product, not imagination. Routes, nav, CTAs, README, marketing copy, existing PRDs.
• Evidence or hypothesis — say which. Tag [data], [observed], or [judgment]. Presenting [judgment] as [data] is the cardinal sin.
• Findable beats beautiful. Depth, labels, and grouping vs the user's mental model, not the module layout.
• Prioritize by impact × effort. Slow checkout beats a slow About page.

How to reason — Observe → Interpret → Classify → Severity

1. Observe — quote the story, the step, the route/nav evidence, and the walkthrough or funnel number
2. Interpret — can the persona complete the claimed task, and is the next click obvious?
3. Classify — COMPLETED / COMPLETED-WITH-FRICTION / BLOCKED; evidence tag [data] / [observed] / [judgment]
4. Severity — Blocker = cannot complete; then impact × effort. A "confusing" page with 95% pass-through is not Critical

Worked example

Observe: Story "As a returning customer I want to reorder — done when confirmation shows." Desktop: 7 clicks; cart cleared on refresh at step 3. Mobile 390: hamburger does not open; pricing unreachable. No analytics SDK. Interpret: mobile cannot start the story; desktop completes with data-loss friction. Nothing to upgrade the evidence tag. Classify: BLOCKED (mobile nav) + COMPLETED-WITH-FRICTION (desktop cart). Evidence: [observed]. Severity: Blocker for mobile findability; High for cart-loss. Finding: Checkout loses cart on refresh | Blocker | observed | buy §3 | High × Med | debug-error → enhance-web-ux

Phase 0 — Derive the stories and scope the trigger [HIGH freedom]

0a. Extract user stories from the real product

# Route inventory (framework-appropriate)
fd -H 'page\.(tsx|jsx|vue|svelte)' app/ src/app/ 2>/dev/null; fd -H . src/routes pages 2>/dev/null -t f
# Navigation + entry points
rg -n -i "<nav|navbar|sidebar|menu|Link.*href|routerLink|to=\"/" -g '*.{tsx,jsx,vue,svelte}' -l
# What the product promises (CTAs, marketing verbs)
rg -n -i "get started|sign up|buy|checkout|create|upload|invite|export|book|order|subscribe" -g '*.{tsx,jsx,vue,svelte,md}'
# Existing story sources — reuse, don't re-invent
fd -H -i 'prd|user-stor|journey|persona' docs/ .cursor/ 2>/dev/null

Write 5–10 stories max, each with a completion signal: As [persona], I want [goal] — done when [observable outcome]. If design-prd output or plan-test-coverage story inventory exists, start from it.

0b. Scope by audit trigger (sets depth and method)

Phase 1 — Information architecture & navigation audit (structural) [HIGH freedom]

Build the route tree, then audit structure against findability. Detailed commands and pass/fail signals in references/checklist.md.

Verdicts: Pass / Fail / N-A with file:line or route evidence. IA6 requires the browser (Phase 2).

Phase 2 — Story-by-story task walkthroughs (headed browser) [LOW freedom — run exactly]

Walk every story from Phase 0, entry → completion signal, desktop and mobile viewport (390px — most real friction is mobile). Per story record:

STORY: [As … I want … — done when …]     Trigger tag: [data|observed|judgment]
Entry: [landing/deep-link]   Steps to goal: N clicks / M inputs
Friction log: [each hesitation, mislabel, backtrack, surprise — with screenshot]
Error recovery: [wrong input / back button / refresh mid-flow — data survives? path recoverable?]
Success moment: [is completion confirmed clearly? what happens next?]
Result: COMPLETED / COMPLETED-WITH-FRICTION / BLOCKED (blocker = finding, severity Blocker)

Rules: screenshots to .playwright-mcp/ per the artifact-hygiene rule; forms judged only for flow-level friction (field-level → enhance-web-forms); per-page heuristic violations noticed along the way are handed to audit-ux, not re-audited here.

Phase 3 — Evidence layer (validate or label) [HIGH freedom]

# What analytics exist?
rg -n -i "gtag|googletagmanager|G-[A-Z0-9]{6,}|posthog|clarity\.ms|hotjar|amplitude|mixpanel|plausible|umami|fathom" -g '*.{ts,tsx,js,jsx,html,vue,svelte}' -l

• Data available (GA4/PostHog/Clarity/Amplitude/Mixpanel, or Sentry for error hotspots): pull funnel completion and drop-off per story path, top exit pages, rage-click/dead-click signals. Upgrade or refute walkthrough findings — a "confusing" page with a 95% pass-through rate is not a Critical finding.
• No data (typical pre-launch): every finding stays [observed] or [judgment]. Say so in the report, and recommend minimal instrumentation (page + funnel events on core stories) so the next audit has evidence.

Phase 4 — Prioritized report [HIGH freedom]

## UX Journey & IA Audit — [product] — [date]
**Trigger:** [scenario] · **Stories audited:** N · **Evidence:** [analytics available? which]
**Working well:** [1–3 genuine strengths — always present]

### Task-completion matrix
| Story | Result | Steps | Frictions | Blockers | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reorder as returning customer | COMPLETED-WITH-FRICTION | 7 (target ≤4) | 3 | – | [observed] |
| Find pricing from landing | BLOCKED (mobile) | – | – | menu unreachable | [observed] |

### IA verdicts (IA1–IA9)
| Check | Verdict | Evidence |
|---|---|---|

### Findings (each: severity · evidence tag · story · impact×effort quadrant)
| # | Finding | Severity | Evidence | Story/step | Impact | Effort | Fix via |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Checkout loses cart on refresh at step 3 | Blocker | observed | buy §5 | High | Med | debug-error → enhance-web-ux |

### Quick wins (high impact · low effort — do first)
### Roadmap (high impact · high effort)
### Deprioritized (low impact — listed, not scheduled)
### Validate next (all [judgment] findings + the instrumentation to settle them)

Language discipline: neutral, behavior-grounded observations ("3 of 5 walkthrough runs backtracked at X"), never accusatory. One observation per finding, one paragraph max.

Forbidden: presenting [judgment] as data; re-auditing per-page heuristics/microcopy that audit-ux owns; inventing personas unmoored from the product; recommending a full redesign when incremental fixes close the findings; a findings dump with no impact×effort prioritization; only-negatives reports (name what works); auditing without walking the stories (a route-tree grep alone is not a journey audit).

Self-critique before reporting [LOW freedom — do not skip]

1. Walked, not grepped — every story has an entry → completion (or BLOCKED) record
2. Evidence tagged — [judgment] is never presented as [data]
3. Artifacts — screenshots under .playwright-mcp/
4. Right owner — per-page heuristics → audit-ux; forms → enhance-web-forms; breakpoint layout → audit-responsive
5. Nothing implemented — report-first; delegate fixes

Related

• audit-responsive — page-level layout/IA at 375 / 768 / 1440 (this skill is cross-page stories)
• audit-ux — per-page NN/g heuristics, Laws of UX, microcopy, emotional design (the page lens to this skill's path lens)
• enhance-web-ux / enhance-web-forms — fix the screens and forms this audit flags
• audit-uiux-design-system — visual token/component compliance
• audit-accessibility / audit-performance — WCAG and speed lenses (delegated)
• audit-realworld — full-stack feature parity vs the RealWorld reference
• plan-test-coverage — same story inventory, test-coverage lens; share Phase 0 output
• design-prd — where stories come from on greenfield; this skill audits them post-build
• test-playwright — turn walkthroughs into regression coverage after fixes
• complete-everything — close the audited gaps to done with verification