Designer: the run of 2026-10-22T1755Z

The review, in the reader's words

The type, colour and evidence styling feel calm and trustworthy, and the front page does point a newcomer somewhere sensible, but two stacked utility boxes sit above every headline, an unlabelled pound figure ticks down as I move around, and the page labels do not agree with each other, so the site looks more finished than it guides.

Got the answer partly · Trust and look were clear on the first desktop screen of index.html; the guidance question was answered on start/index.html (the reader map); the every-screen question only partly, after the phone screenshots showed the headline pushed to the lower third of the first screen on every page.

What works

• Strong serif headline, a generous sans-serif standfirst and one filled teal call to action beside two outlined ones: on desktop the one thing to read first is unmistakable. (index.html)
• Dark mode is a real theme, not an inversion: the teal shifts to a brighter mint, the red rules soften, and the instruments found 0 low-contrast pairs in dark on every page. (index.html)
• The 'Right now' cards with a red left rule and small grey source chips make every sentence look sourced at a glance; it is the most trustworthy visual pattern on the site. (index.html)
• The reader map is a genuine piece of information design: two axes, dot-scale depth markers (one, two, three dots) and coloured initial avatars by role group. (start/index.html)
• The boxed 'The answer in thirty seconds' panel with the reader's avatar and a single 'Read the site as Alex' button is the clearest hand-hold for a newcomer anywhere on the site. (briefings/everyone/index.html)
• Status badges are consistent between the front page and the claims table (CONFIRMED in green, UNVERIFIED in red, REPORTED and DISPUTED neutral) and each is defined once above the table. (claims/index.html)
• Pill-shaped jump links (letters on the glossary, questions on the explainer) give long pages a visible table of contents in the first screen. (explained/index.html)
• No horizontal overflow on any page at phone, tablet or desktop, and no images missing alt text. (claims/index.html)

What does not

• high On a phone the site chrome eats most of the first screen: masthead, a theme dot, a price pill, the 'New to this story?' banner, the 'Your reading' panel and the RESEARCH band all come before the headline. (claims/index.html)
  Phone metrics put the h1 at 590px on claims and 550px on index.html in an 812px-tall screen; on briefings/everyone the thirty-second answer box only starts at the very bottom edge of fold-phone.png.
• high An unlabelled money figure sits in the masthead and changes from page to page with no explanation, which reads as a charge and undermines trust for a newcomer. (index.html)
  Desktop pill shows '£4.99' on index.html, '£4.96' on briefings/everyone, '£4.95' on claims and glossary, '£4.94' on explained; the phone shows '£5.00', '£4.98' and '£4.97'. Nothing on the visible page says what it is.
• medium Page labels contradict each other: the band, the kicker and the highlighted menu item disagree about which part of the site a page belongs to. (glossary/index.html)
  glossary: band 'ABOUT THIS SITE', kicker 'START HERE', menu highlights 'Start here'. explained: band 'RESEARCH' but kicker 'START HERE'. articles: band 'ABOUT THIS SITE' on the Stories page, while articles itself says 'Every page on the site says at its top which half it belongs to'.
• medium Desktop navigation wraps: 'About' drops alone onto a second row under 'SITE', which looks like a layout bug at 1440px. (index.html)
  fold.png on every page: the 'SITE' label ends row one and 'About ▾' sits by itself on row two at y=99.
• medium The reading-tracker panel ('Your reading: on this page 9 new, 0 changed, 0 read', fade / hide / show) is the first thing on every page, above the headline, and means nothing to a first-time visitor. (index.html)
  It is the first block of fold text on all seven pages, ahead of the h1; 'Read items: fade hide show' has no explanation.
• medium Small, glyph-only controls repeat across the site and fail the tap-target check on phone. (claims/index.html)
  147 targets under 24px on claims at phone width; examples include the '○' and '⋯' buttons on every claim row (they do carry aria-labels, but visually they are bare symbols), and the theme switcher on phone is a lone teal dot with no visible label.
• low Machine provenance is shown at reader level on story cards and section footers, cluttering cards and contradicting the site's own version. (articles/index.html)
  'House · Journalist · 2026-10-22 · claude-journalist · site v0.4.0 · vault commit 200d08971937 · data as of 2026-10-22T11:34Z'; front-page sections say 'This section v1 written in site v0.3.2' while the masthead says v0.4.3.
• low Counts on the front page do not match the status scheme used on the claims page. (index.html)
  index.html: '70 statements checked: 22 confirmed, 11 disputed, 4 unverified'; claims: '22 confirmed, 33 reported, 8 disputed, 3 contradicted, 4 unverified'. The front page legend also lists four status words, claims lists five.
• low Smallest text is just under 12px on six of seven pages. (start/index.html)
  min_font_px 11.84 with 16 blocks below 12px on start; the metadata lines ('This page v4 written in site v0.3.1') are visibly the faintest, smallest text on the page.

What this reader would change, in order

1. On phone, move the 'Your reading' panel and the RESEARCH / ABOUT band below the h1 and standfirst (or collapse them into one line), so the headline is in the top third of the first screen. (index.html, medium)
   The headline is the one thing to read first and on a phone it currently starts two-thirds of the way down on every page.
2. Label the pound pill in the masthead (for example 'Reading credit: £4.95, free') or hide it until the reader opens the account menu. (index.html, small)
   An unexplained, falling money figure is the single biggest trust risk for a newcomer.
3. Make the band, kicker and highlighted menu item come from one source, so glossary and explained both say the same section, and the Stories page says STORIES. (glossary/index.html, small)
   The site promises each page states which half it belongs to; inconsistent labels break that promise visibly.
4. Fit the desktop navigation on one row at 1440px (tighten spacing or fold 'About' into the masthead). (index.html, small)
   The orphaned 'About' makes every page look slightly broken on the main desktop size.
5. Give the '○' and '⋯' row controls and the read-state pills a 24px minimum hit area, and give the phone theme switcher a visible text label. (claims/index.html, small)
   147 undersized targets on the one page where readers most need to tap sources.
6. Show only the reader's 'Read items' controls after the first page mark, with a one-line hint the first time ('Mark what you have read; we keep it in this browser'). (start/index.html, medium)
   Fade, hide and show mean nothing before a newcomer has read anything.
7. Move vault commit, agent name and 'written in site vX' lines into the history link, leaving date and author on the card. (articles/index.html, small)
   The cards read as build logs; the provenance is good but it is not reader-level information.
8. Align the front-page counts with the claims page's five statuses, including reported. (index.html, small)
   A designer notices when two summaries of the same numbers disagree, and so will a sceptical reader.

Lines this reader reacted to

• index.html: Phones and personal computers are not affected.
  Placed last in the standfirst at a large size: the reassurance a newcomer needs, exactly where they look.
• index.html: Your reading: on this page 9 new, 0 changed, 0 read; across the site 340 new and 0 changed of 340.
  The first words on the page, before the headline. As a first-time visitor this is noise.
• start/index.html: Across: how much technical language the reader wants. Down: what they need to do with the story. Pick the one closest to you.
  A clear instruction for a two-axis chart; the visual delivers on it.
• briefings/everyone/index.html: You do not need to know anything about computers to follow this.
  Lands well, set right under the answer box.
• claims/index.html: The words are defined here, once, and the build refuses a claim whose sources are not in the manifest.
  Trust-building idea, but 'the build' and 'the manifest' are internal words in the intro paragraph of a page also flagged at reading ease 27.8.
• articles/index.html: Every page on the site says at its top which half it belongs to.
  A good promise that the page itself breaks: this Stories page is labelled ABOUT THIS SITE.
• explained/index.html: Words in the dotted underline are explained when you hover or tap them.
  Good, and the dotted underline is consistent everywhere, though the underlined terms are small tap targets on a phone.

Since the last run

First run: no previous review to compare with.

Reviewer: agent-session.

The journey

The pages in the order read: the start, the reader's path, then the links that matched its interests.

What the instruments flagged

Measurements, not verdicts: the review says which of them mattered to this reader.

Everything this run saw

Vault dpdx3q13 · read key sgit_public_read_d38e486c514c3f320e437bf757110c772af8241c595baa6ec0a4504d72069297:dpdx3q13 (read-only, published on purpose)

Open the vault read-only in a new tab ↗ · sgit clone sgit_public_read_d38e486c514c3f320e437bf757110c772af8241c595baa6ec0a4504d72069297:dpdx3q13

This run is in the folder runs/2026-10-22T1755Z/: the served and rendered HTML, the text and the screenshots of every page, every request and console message, and what the reviewer was given.