Editorial standards

How UX Companion is written, sourced, reviewed, corrected and maintained. Reference-product content lives or dies on trust — this page documents how that trust is earned. Every policy stated here is enforced on every page.

Authorship

Every page on UX Companion is written by Jamie Pow personally. Nothing is ghostwritten, nothing is generated by AI as final output, nothing is paid content presented as editorial. Where a page benefits from external review — accessibility criteria interpretation, legal compliance, a specific technical detail — the reviewer is credited by name at the end of the page.

Sourcing and citations

Definitions are drafted from first-hand practitioner experience and cross-checked against the following primary sources:

• WCAG 2.2 — the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are the source of truth for every accessibility claim on the site. Specific success criteria are cited by number (e.g. WCAG 2.5.8) rather than paraphrased.
• Nielsen Norman Group — the canonical source for Nielsen's 10 heuristics, severity scoring, discount usability methods, and the wider corpus of usability research. Cited by article name and year where a specific claim depends on it.
• Peer-reviewed HCI publications — CHI proceedings, ACM DL, and the psychology sources for cognitive-load, attention, working-memory and gestalt claims.
• Named practitioner works — Alan Cooper on personas, Don Norman on affordance, Jakob Nielsen on heuristics, Christina Wodtke on OKRs and IA, Jared Spool on research methods, Alex Rainert and colleagues on design leadership. Cited by author.
• Product and framework documentation — Apple Human Interface Guidelines, Material Design, Google's HEART framework, official product docs for named tools.

Where a source is contested or evolving (a WCAG interpretation, a definition where practitioners disagree), the disagreement is acknowledged in the entry rather than presenting one view as canonical.

Copyrighted material is never reproduced. Quotes are limited to short, attributed excerpts where doing so materially clarifies the point.

Review process

Every page goes through the same review before publishing:

• Draft — written from the practitioner brief, without AI assistance for the substantive content. LLMs may assist with copy-editing or with generating counterexamples the author then verifies, but not with generating the first draft of any definition or article.
• Framework check — every claim traceable to a source is annotated with the source. Claims that can't be sourced are either dropped or reframed as author opinion (and marked as such).
• Accessibility check — the page renders correctly with keyboard-only navigation, passes WCAG 2.2 AA contrast, is announced correctly by NVDA/VoiceOver, and reflows below 320px width.
• Cross-link review — the page connects to at least three related pages (glossary entries, methodology guides, or tools) via contextual links, not decorative "related posts" widgets.
• Freshness stamp — the page carries a datePublished and dateModified in machine-readable schema and human-visible metadata.

Corrections policy

Substantive corrections — factual errors, misattributed claims, out-of-date WCAG references, stale market data — are made within one working week of being reported. The page's dateModified is updated, and where the correction changes the meaning of the page (rather than a typo fix) a note is added at the bottom of the page explaining what changed and when.

Report corrections to hello@uxcompanion.co.uk or via the contact page. Corrections are acknowledged by email; credited if the reporter wants attribution.

Update cadence

Pages are audited on a rolling schedule. Glossary entries are reviewed annually, or immediately if a foundational source (WCAG version, Nielsen Norman article, an established framework) is updated. Audit and methodology pages are reviewed every six months because market pricing, tool availability and regulatory context change faster. Career pages (portfolio, interview, salary) are reviewed quarterly because the market moves fastest there.

The most recent dateModified on any page is the honest date the substantive content was last audited — not a mechanical timestamp bumped on every deploy.

AI policy

UX Companion covers AI-in-UX practice extensively (see AI for UX designers, AI-assisted UX research, what AI should not replace in UX). The site's editorial position on AI applies to the site itself.

• No AI-generated content ships as final published text. LLMs may assist with copy-editing, brainstorming counterexamples, or drafting FAQ candidate wording — always followed by human authorship and verification.
• No AI-generated imagery is used on the site as of this policy date. If that changes, the change is disclosed on this page.
• AI tools referenced editorially (Claude, GPT-4, Crazy Egg's behavioural AI, Maze's research AI, Figma AI plugins) are described from practitioner use — not from marketing material — and updated when their capabilities materially change.

Commercial disclosure

UX Companion earns a small fee from a limited set of relevant advertising and affiliate placements. Every commercial link is:

• Contextually relevant — a recommendation appears only where the product genuinely helps with the task described on that page. No general affiliate blocks appear across pages where the product isn't materially useful.
• Labelled explicitly — every affiliate block carries an "Affiliate partner" label and the specific reason for the recommendation.
• Marked with rel="sponsored noopener nofollow" in the HTML, per Google's affiliate-linking guidelines.
• Capped at two placements per page as a general rule, with a documented exception for comparison-hub pages (e.g. the courses comparison, the tool-review pages) where multiple placements are the point of the page.

The complete list of every advertising and affiliate relationship is on the disclosure page.

Advertising

UX Companion may display Google AdSense ads. Ads are:

• Clearly labelled ("Advertisement") next to each ad slot.
• Placed in defined zones — never inside a definition, article body, or interactive tool where they would compete with the primary content.
• Excluded from thin utility pages (privacy, terms, disclosure, contact) where ads would degrade the reference role of the page.

If the ad experience ever undermines the reference product, ads come off before the reference does.

Reader privacy

UX Companion uses Google Analytics 4 for aggregate traffic understanding. No personally-identifying information is collected beyond what GA4 receives natively. There are no gated downloads, no email capture walls, no tracking pixels beyond the standard ones documented on the privacy page.

Contact and accountability

The editorial standards on this page are enforced by Jamie Pow personally as the site's sole author. Anything on the site that doesn't meet these standards is either a defect to be corrected or a page to be improved. Report either to hello@uxcompanion.co.uk.

Policy last reviewed 29 September 2026