Most redesigns start the same way. Someone opens the live site, scrolls around, and says "this feels dated" or "the nav is confusing." That feeling becomes the brief. It is also, usually, wrong about where the real damage is.
We do not sell that approach to clients. The Hexagram Audit exists because "it feels off" is not a diagnosis. So when it came time to rebuild our own site, we held ourselves to the same standard: score it first, redesign second.
The tool, not the vibe
We used Jev, a "System One" model from Typesafe AI, to do the scoring. It is worth being precise about what that is, because it is not a chatbot and it was not brainstorming with us. System One models are built for fast, structured decisions rather than conversation: you give them a schema, they return a value that matches it, with a confidence score attached, in well under a second. No back-and-forth, no prose, no hallucinated field that almost fits.
That distinction mattered here. We did not want an AI's opinion on whether the homepage was "good." We wanted every page and section scored against the same fixed axes, the same way every time, so the output could be ranked and prioritised instead of argued about.
What we fed it
Not screenshots. Not a content export. We pointed it at the actual GitHub repository, the real source, and had it score the site page by page and section by section across three axes:
- UI: whether the interface was doing its job, or just occupying space
- Flow: whether a visitor could move from question to answer without friction
- Copy: whether the words on the page were saying something specific, or filling a template
Each score came back with a confidence value, so we knew which findings to trust immediately and which to sanity-check ourselves before acting on them.
The output was the brief
The scored list became the actual work order for the rebuild, not a mood board. Sections that scored weak on flow got restructured before anything got restyled. Sections that scored weak on copy got rewritten from real client and market content instead of placeholder text. The Hexagram itself, previously a homepage decoration, became the site's actual navigation logic, because the flow scoring made it obvious that "six pillars" was the organising idea visitors needed to find everywhere, not just admire once.
It also caught the less glamorous gaps a gut-check tends to miss: thin sections that only existed as a single paragraph, pages that were technically live but never actually finished, places where the interface worked on a laptop and quietly broke on anything narrower. None of that shows up when you eyeball your own homepage. It shows up when something is forced to score every page the same way and can't be talked out of a low number.
The pattern, stated plainly
Diagnose with a structured tool. Prioritise by the score, not by whoever argues loudest in the room. Implement in that order. Review before it ships.
That is the Hexagram Audit. We just pointed it at ourselves before we pointed it at anyone else's business.
Want the same treatment for your own marketing? The Hexagram Diagnostic is the free first step, and working with us explains how the full Audit goes page by page. A related story: the bug we found in our own diagnostic.
