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For Designers

Evaluate Your Own Designs

Run three forced-perspective critiques on any design: the confused user, the skeptical engineer, the impatient PM. Get specific problems, not encouragement.

20 minbeginner
evaluate-your-designsThe situation

You have finished a design and want honest feedback before sharing it. You know what happens when you ask Claude "what do you think?": positives first, two gentle suggestions buried at the end, nothing you can actually act on.

You'll run three forced-perspective critiques and walk away with a prioritised list of real problems ranked by user impact, not a list of encouragement.

Follow along:

You need: The Claude desktop app for Mac or Windows. It can read a folder of your files.

What you walk away with

01

Three forced-perspective critiques: the confused user, the skeptical engineer, the impatient PM

02

A ranked list of real problems sorted by user impact, not design effort

03

A synthesis you can present to a team without making the design sound broken

step 01

Set up the critique

Paste a screenshot or describe the screen in detail: what is on it, what the user is trying to do, what the flow looks like. In the desktop app you can also point Claude at the exported file in your project folder.

Prompt
# Describe the design for Claude to critique: "Here is the design I want you to critique. Screen: User goal: What's on the screen: Platform: User: "

Click a violet field and type your own details, then copy.

what you should see

step 02

Run the confused user perspective

This perspective takes the viewpoint of a real user who does not understand digital conventions. It surfaces copy problems, interaction confusion, and assumed knowledge that should not be assumed.

Prompt
# Prompt for the confused user: "You are a first-time smartphone user with low digital literacy. You have never set up an account before. You don't know what a PIN is or why you need one. Review this screen and tell me every point of confusion you would experience. Stay in character. Don't suggest solutions. Just describe the confusion."

what you should see

step 03

Run the engineer and PM perspectives

The engineer catches what you will have to build that you have not designed for. The PM asks whether this screen earns its place in the flow.

Prompt
# Prompt for the skeptical engineer: "You are a frontend developer who has to build this screen. Tell me every edge case, error state, and implementation problem you see. What have I not designed for?" # Prompt for the impatient PM: "You are a PM focused on conversion and retention. Is this screen earning its place in the flow? What friction would you cut? What would you move to later?"

what you should see

step 04

Synthesise into a prioritised action list

Ask Claude to take everything across all three perspectives and produce a ranked list of fixes, ranked by user impact, not design effort.

Prompt
Turn your three-perspective critique into a prioritised action list. Group by: must fix before sharing, should fix before handoff, consider for next iteration. Include the heuristic or principle each item violates.

what you should see

step 05

Common mistakes

Four failure modes for this process.

  1. Asking for a general review instead of a forced perspective. "Review my design" produces hedged praise. "You are a confused first-time user: describe every point of confusion" produces usable findings. The perspective constraint is the mechanism.
  2. Letting Claude out of character. If Claude starts suggesting solutions mid-critique, bring it back: "Stay in character. Only describe the problem, not the fix." Solutions come in the synthesis step.
  3. Running all three perspectives in one prompt. If you ask for all three at once without separating them, the output blends perspectives and the engineer issues get mixed with the user issues. Run them separately, then synthesise.
  4. Skipping the synthesis step. Three separate critiques are hard to act on. The synthesis groups them by urgency and gives you something you can put in a sprint. Do not skip it even if the critiques feel complete on their own.

What's next?

Do a heuristic evaluation

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