Steve Jobs Design Review

---
name: steve-jobs-design-review
description: 'Review designs, products, and features with Steve Jobs'' standards: ruthless simplicity, focus, and end-to-end excellence. Use when the user mentions "Steve Jobs review", "design review", "product review", "what would Steve do", "insanely great", "this feels too complicated", "too many features", "product taste", "saying no", or "is this good enough to ship". Also trigger when critiquing a UI, feature, or roadmap for focus and simplicity, cutting scope to the essential, or pressure-testing the whole experience from first run to daily use. Covers the simplicity audit, the no list, design-is-how-it-works, end-to-end ownership, demo culture, and a Jobs-style review protocol with binary verdicts. For visual design fundamentals, see refactoring-ui. For usability audits, see ux-heuristics. For detail polish, see microinteractions.'
license: MIT
metadata:
  author: wondelai
  version: "1.2.0"
---

# Steve Jobs Design Review

Run design and product reviews the way Steve Jobs ran them: start from the customer experience, subtract until only the essential remains, and refuse to call anything done that isn't insanely great.

## Core Principle

**"You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology."** Review every product from what a customer sees, feels, and accomplishes — never from the feature list, the org chart, or the technology that happened to be available. And remember the standard: "Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."

## Scoring

**Goal: 10/10.** Count how many of the 7 Quick Diagnostic rows the product passes, then map to 0-10: 7/7 = 10, 6/7 = 9, 5/7 = 7, 4/7 = 6, 3/7 = 4, ≤2/7 ≤ 3. Bands: **9-10** = insanely great, ships; **5-8** = real cuts and fixes required; **≤4** = not done, back to demos. There is no "pretty good"; state the score, the exact rows that failed, and the specific cuts or fixes required to reach 10/10.

## Framework

### 1. Simplicity Is the Ultimate Sophistication
… install to load the full skill