/ux-discover

/ux-discover — the forcing function

No generation without discovery.

This is the discipline gate. The 10-field intake every project goes through before /ux-design, /ux-component, /ux-recommend, or any other generation command runs. The plugin asks; you answer; the engine has constraints to work with instead of guessing.

The 10 fields:

1. Project type — landing / marketing-site / dashboard / admin-panel / docs / mobile-app / email
2. Audience — who specifically. Concrete. "B2B finance ops in MENA", not "business users."
3. Primary goal — ONE job for this surface. Trial signup. Pricing comprehension. At-a-glance dashboard status.
4. Tone — 3-5 words. warm / editorial / precise / playful / clinical / confident / calm / bold / technical.
5. Must-have — hard constraints. dark-mode / RTL / AA accessibility / mobile-first / print-fidelity.
6. Forbidden — what NOT to do. "No purple-to-blue gradient. No three-card hero. No Inter as display."
7. Reference brands — 3-5 real brands whose design language fits. Pulled into the recommender as exemplars.
8. Stack — react / nextjs / vue / svelte / blade-alpine / astro / vanilla-html.
9. Region / locale — mena / us / eu / apac / global. Affects RTL, typography, color norms, copy style.
10. Success metric — how will you know it worked? Signup CR > 4%. TTI < 2s. Lighthouse > 95.

When to use

• Starting a new project, surface, or marketing page from zero.
• Before any /ux-design, /ux-component, or /ux-recommend.
• When picking up a stalled project and you need to re-anchor on the brief.

When to skip

• You're fixing a bug in existing code → use /ux-fix.
• You're auditing → use /ux-audit or /ux-lint.
• You already have a .ux/last-discovery.json for this project and the brief hasn't changed.

How it runs

Inside Claude Code:

python3 -m engine.cli.main discover

The CLI walks the 10 questions interactively, then writes the answers to .ux/last-discovery.json. Subsequent commands (/ux-recommend, /ux-design, /ux-component) auto-load that file if present.

Output

.ux/last-discovery.json:

{
  "answers": {
    "project_type": "landing",
    "audience": "B2C, mobile-first, MENA region",
    "primary_goal": "Trial signup",
    "tone": "warm, editorial, trustworthy",
    "must_have": "dark-mode, rtl-arabic, a11y-AA",
    "forbidden": "brutalism, purple-gradients, emoji-in-ui",
    "reference_brands": "Stripe, Linear, Mercury",
    "stack": "nextjs-15-app-router",
    "region": "mena",
    "success_metric": "Signup CR > 4%"
  },
  "complete": true,
  "missing": []
}

Resume from a saved discovery

ux discover --load-state .ux/last-discovery.json   # answer the missing fields only

Why this exists

Because the alternative — letting the LLM "infer reasonable defaults" — is exactly what produces AI slop. Default Inter font, default purple gradient, default three-card hero. The 10 questions remove the guesswork. The plugin can't improvise its way past a structured input.

Chaining

After discovery completes, the natural next steps:

• /ux-recommend → uses your discovery to pick style + palette + type + motion + components.
• /ux-design [extra brief] → generates frontend code grounded in the recommendation.
• /ux-component <name> → generates one component aligned to the discovered constraints.