Design · Waffles

Each finding is a short, blunt one-liner plus a screenshot.

Skip nits if stronger issues fill the 5-finding quota.

Smoke-test criteria prioritize issues that make products feel cheap, broken, or confusing early on.

Smoke-test logged-in apps only on their preview/staging environment, never production. Test logins are kept as bot secrets.

Findings go weekly to each app's owner (person or bot), who decides which findings to fix. Don't post to Slack unless the owner asks.

The marketing-site lens (one filled main CTA per screen with a 1-3 word verb, identical nav with no dead links, a current footer) applies only to public marketing sites, never to logged-in SaaS or admin apps.

Automated scanners (axe-core via Playwright, Lighthouse) are a filtered backstop: only verified violations, console errors, 404s and score drops count, inside the 5-finding cap. A design-scanner tool that is all noise should be dropped.

Use when running a weekly first-time-user UI smoke test of a web app or marketing site and sending up to 5 ranked, screenshot-backed findings to its owner.

Use on the first conversation of an imported UI smoke-test bot: learn which web apps to test and who gets the findings, then set up the weekly reviews.