Hover Active Focus Checklist

Require every interactive component to define all of its states before it ships.

moderate User Experience

What it adds

A per-component state matrix covering rest, hover, active, focus, selected, disabled, and loading.

What your agent is told to do

1
Enumerate the interactive components the app actually ships — buttons, links, inputs, selects, rows, cards, tabs, menu items — and give each a written matrix covering rest, hover, active, visible focus, selected, disabled, and loading. What selected and disabled mean is owned by Selection State Pattern and Disabled State Standards; this brief owns the guarantee that no component leaves a cell of the matrix empty.
2
Express each state as a change of shared tokens rather than a bespoke rule per component, so a button and a table row communicate the same state with the same values.
3
Specify what happens when states combine, because they will: focused and disabled, selected and hovered, active and loading. Choose the winner for each pair rather than letting stylesheet order decide it.
4
Hold dimensions constant across states. A border that only appears on hover, or a heavier font weight on selection, shifts the layout under the cursor — reserve the space at rest instead.
5
Do not attach meaning that exists only on hover. Touch and keyboard users never reach a hover state, so anything discoverable there must also be present on focus or permanently visible.

Edge cases it handles

Hover on a touch device is either absent or sticks after a tap, leaving a row highlighted long after the user has moved on. Treat hover as decoration, never as the only route to an action.
Keyboard focus and selection routinely land on the same element and must stay separately identifiable — a user tabbing through a list needs to see where they are as well as what they have chosen.
Combined states are where the matrix breaks. A disabled control that still lights up on hover, or a focused row whose outline is overwritten by the selection style, both read as defects.
Any state that adds a border, an inset shadow, or a heavier weight has to be accounted for at rest, or the element grows and pushes its neighbours sideways.
Focus indicators must clear both the element's own background and whatever sits next to it, including items at the edge of a scrolling container where an outline is easily clipped.
Users who have asked for reduced motion must still get the state change; it is the transition that is dropped, not the state.
The matrix has to cover custom controls assembled from generic containers, which is precisely where focus and disabled states are usually missing.

Definition of done

Every interactive component has a documented state matrix with no empty cells.
States are expressed through shared tokens rather than per-component rules.
Combined states have a defined precedence and render predictably.
No state change alters an element's dimensions or shifts its neighbours.
No action or information is reachable only through hover.
Focus is visible on every focusable element and is distinguishable from selection.
State transitions honour a reduced-motion preference without losing the state itself.
The feature matches the existing design system.
No existing functionality is broken.

Related features

Feedback Widget

Interactive Transcript

Reschedule and Cancel Links

How it works

1

Copy the link

Grab the Markdown instruction URL for this feature.
2

Give it to your AI

Paste it into Claude Code, Cursor, v0, Lovable — whatever you build with.
3

It inspects, then implements

Your agent reads your existing app first, then adds the feature to fit it.

Works with your stack

These instructions are written to adapt. They tell the agent to detect your framework, match your existing design system, and reuse what you already have — rather than assuming a particular stack.

Need it tighter than that? Customize the feature and tell it exactly what you're running.