audit-ux-architecture

To audit UX architecture, evaluate Garrett's five planes from strategy to surface, checking for conscious decisions and cascading rationale. This process diagnoses coherence across strategy, scope, structure, skeleton, and surface to determine if features form an architecture or unrelated parts.

Garrett's five planes framework structures UX design into strategy, scope, structure, skeleton, and surface layers. Auditing these planes verifies conscious design decisions, traceability of evidence, and surface alignment with underlying rationale.

Document UX audit findings by capturing explicit evidence like user quotes, UI context, and HTML. This supports targeted, plane-specific recommendations and verifies that design decisions are traceable across the five planes.

Common UX architecture defects include strategy conflicts, feature creep, information-architecture misalignment, navigation anomalies, and surface-skeleton mismatches. Identifying these issues surfaces where design decisions are implicit, unconscious, or misapplied.

You need a UX architecture audit during design reviews, UX audits, or product-architecture workshops. It is required when evaluating strategy coherence, scope coverage, structure navigation, skeleton clarity, and surface alignment to ensure architectural integrity.

Heuristic evaluation diagnoses navigation anomalies and surface-skeleton mismatches by applying Garrett's framework. It identifies where structure navigation and skeleton clarity fail to align with the underlying surface design rationale.