Frontend Visual QA

Frontend Visual QA

Audit the interface the user can actually see. Treat build success, DOM presence, and uninspected screenshot files as supporting signals, never as visual proof.

Default to audit-only. Do not edit implementation, add tests, install dependencies, or update snapshots unless the user explicitly asks to fix or change the UI. Permission to fix source does not authorize rebuilding, restarting, or deploying any target.

Scope And Routing

Use this skill only after a rendered artifact exists. Select the smallest audit profile that covers the request:

• core visual — composition, typography, spacing, wrapping, clipping, images;
• responsive — breakpoints, reflow, mobile alternatives, scroll ownership;
• state and journey — conditional branches, transitions, recovery, routes;
• browser output — download, share, clipboard, popup, file dialog, print, PDF;
• native shell — Electron or hybrid chrome, permissions, drag regions, IPC UI;
• page contract — dashboard/admin, landing/deck, design-system artifact, browser tool/game, map/GIS, or review tool;
• reference parity — comparison with a named screenshot, product, or tier;
• data visualization — chart hierarchy, tokens, semantics, and accessibility.

Combine profiles only when the changed surface or the user requests a broad release review. Do not force a local line-break review through unrelated auth, map, export, and native-shell checks.

Use adjacent skills by stage:

• Use ui-designer, frontend-design, or another design skill to derive or create a visual direction.
• Use this skill to test the already-rendered result.
• Use qa-expert for a full test strategy, defect program, and release metrics.
• Use both this skill and qa-expert only when rendered visual evidence is one part of a broader QA gate.
• This skill owns rendered information hierarchy as well as geometry: whether persistent labels, explanations and repeated context help the actor's task or displace it. Do not route that question away as mere copy polish. Domain-fact correctness, terminology and persuasion still need the appropriate content or subject-matter review; a rendering pass cannot certify those claims.

Required Outcome

Produce all of the following:

1. A scope contract naming the artifact, actor, job, target kind and canonical target identity, conditional state, viewports, affected journeys, reference/SSOT, and authorization.
2. A verification status: verified, partial, or blocked.
3. Findings tied to visible evidence, impact, state, viewport, and reproduction.
4. A list of what was actually exercised and what remains unverified.
5. When freshness or deployment is claimed, a separate delivery status and its identity evidence; when target mutation is explicitly authorized, identity before/after, a same-target/state/viewport re-run, and a regression guard.

Never downgrade the user's real objective to whatever evidence was easiest to collect.

Workflow

Track this checklist for nontrivial audits:

• [ ] 1. Establish the audit contract and authorization
• [ ] 2. Select the required evidence level and canonical harness
• [ ] 3. Prove the target, state, data, viewport, and claimed freshness
• [ ] 4. Capture and inspect macro, local, and responsive evidence
• [ ] 5. Exercise the affected journeys and recipient outputs
• [ ] 6. Report findings; fix and re-run only when authorized

1. Establish The Audit Contract

Read the project instructions, design-system SSOT, tokens, approved assets, launcher/test SOP, and the changed code. Then write a falsifiable contract:

Artifact/page type: Actor and job: Target kind + canonical identity: web = exact in-browser URL (query/fragment included) + named environment single file/image = canonical path + content hash + rendering scheme multi-resource artifact = canonical entry + dependency/manifest digest + renderer native = installed artifact fingerprint + build/version + process/window + renderer route Conditional state: Delivery identity/status, only when freshness/deployment is claimed: Reference or design-system SSOT: Relevant viewport/device matrix: Intended projection/canvas size, if any: Affected interactions and outputs: Audit profiles: Source authorization: audit-only | fix-and-verify Interaction/action authority: read-only navigation | fixture-safe state changes | <named actions> Target mutation authority: none | isolated diagnostic | local target | deploy <named environment> Anti-goals / must-not-become: Pass condition:

Name the correct state before judging pixels. Logged-out, onboarding, empty, permission-denied, seeded, populated, loading, and feature-flag branches can look like different products. A clean screenshot of the wrong branch is invalid. When authorization is in scope, signed-in-but-role-less is a distinct branch; logged-out or fully privileged evidence cannot stand in for it.

Use the actor's task as the success target. “The chart exists” or “the tab switches” is not enough when the user needs to decide severity, finish a review, or recover from an error.

Freeze the user's requirements separately from the implementation. A complaint about clutter, redundant explanation or wasted space identifies a failure class, not just the circled element. Inspect that class across the declared full surface. Do not silently narrow the review to the last screenshot's rectangles or rewrite the requirement as “the task remains possible” after a candidate fails.

When the pass condition names a visual reference — a screenshot, another product's page, a "make ours look like theirs" — load references/reference-parity-decomposition.md before judging the implementation, and in fix-and-verify mode before writing the next fix round. This does not widen the skill's after-implementation scope: the decomposition is the first act of the audit, applied to the reference artifact (which always already exists), and each parity fix round is implementation happening inside this skill's fix-and-verify authority. If the same request also needs a visual direction created from scratch, that part still belongs to a design skill — hand the finished inventory over rather than re-deriving it there. The contract's first deliverable is the measured structural inventory of the reference, and the parity verdict is a per-relationship diff against that inventory. Fixing only the delta the user's latest screenshot complains about, round after round, converges only by exhausting the user — a real five-round case is decomposed in that file. It also governs two traps that outlive the inventory: your own geometry assertions are Level D for parity (they encode your reading of the reference, and stay green through a misreading), and a user's veto on an effect ("never crop the image") indicts the structural premise that forces the effect, not the parameter that picks its flavor. For a reporting-grade data page compared against a tier reference, that file and references/data_viz_tier_and_token_audit.md divide the work: decomposition governs page structure, the tier benchmark governs data-presentation parameters — load both.

2. Select The Evidence Level

Use the strongest level required by the claim: