Choose how much design a surface owes

Use this when the full design thread is more than the work needs and you want to know what you can safely leave out. Depth is a per-run choice: the same stages serve a throwaway prototype and a public launch at different depths.

Start with a request like:

Pick the risk tier for this design thread and tell me what it owes.

The minimal viable thread

Four steps make the output coherent. Everything else in the pack sharpens them.

1. journey-mapping — the outcome and the failure modes
2. user-flow — the screen list and the per-screen briefs
3. one craft pass per screen — at minimum information-architecture, then interaction-design
4. experience-reviewer — the cold review

Walking the shorter thread is a real choice, not a corner cut. What a skipped step costs is that its input travels forward as an assumption nobody decided, which is why those four are the ones that stay. experience-status tells you where you are on the thread.

The three tiers

explore is the default.

Tier	Choose it when	Each per-screen brief owes
explore	A prototype or a surface still finding its shape	The states the map assigns to the explore band
pilot	A pre-release surface in front of limited real users	Everything in explore, plus the states the map assigns to pilot
production	A public surface in front of all users	Everything in pilot, plus the states the map assigns to production

Which contract fields each tier owes is recorded once, in the contract’s own Required: <tier>+ annotations, and which states it owes is recorded once, in the contract’s shared state-coverage map. Read both there rather than from a list in a guide.

What no tier drops

The shared state-coverage map records, for each state, whether its absence fails WCAG 2.2 AA and names the success criterion behind that judgement. Every state flagged that way is either in the explore set already or is conditional and binds wherever its trigger fires — a surface behind authorization, or a primary action that is irreversible or destroys data the user controls.

So the cheap tier costs you evidence and completeness, never an accessible surface. The quality floor’s accessibility pass applies at every tier.

What crosses to frontend engineering

Three artifacts leave this pack and are read by the frontend pre-flight, each path relative to the design output directory you configure:

Artifact	Path	Written by
Aesthetic direction	direction/<slug>.md	creative-direction
Per-screen brief	screens/<slug>/<screen>.md	user-flow, enriched by interaction-design
Token taxonomy	tokens/<slug>.md	design-system

A slot no artifact fills is not an error: the frontend pre-flight resolves that axis from a lower rung of its visual-authority precedence and records which rung supplied it, so a shortened thread degrades visibly rather than silently.

Where this leads

With the tier chosen, walk the thread from Map the customer journey onward. To decide which copy skill a surface needs, see Choose the right copy mode.