Design principles

“Do it” — Principles of everyday design

Designing is doing

No matter how clear a mind's picture of a solution looks, it takes the hard work of putting it on paper to find out where your blind spot was. This improves the product as well as your craft.

Only do what is right

There is no point in compromising, one-off solutions and quick fixes if you already know in your gut it’s not right. Better to go for what’s most important than to aimlessly wander knowing you’ll go in circles. In the end, the solution most fun to design is the one the users like best.

Make choices early on

Make choices (a choice is something someone can disagree with), then iterate. If you push off your decision making for later, or worse, let the customer or user pick, then you miss out on the most important task of interactive design; guiding the user to their goal. So fail early in order to deliver an even better product.

Do it right or do it better

Stick with your teams or your clients standards, veer off only if you can significantly improve on it. Don’t change design systems as an end in itself, it will only create more work and no benefit.

Go fast or go far

When aiming for prototyping, get it out the door instead of polishing till the last minute. This way you don’t miss out on feedback and chances to learn and improve (yourself and the product).

Focus on the core

Adding more features does not create more value. It only dilutes the core product. New products have to be understood and explained fast. Instead, try to sharpen the core value of what this new product is trying to achieve in order to make it truly great.

Build mental models

In order to provide intuitive interactions to a user they need to be able to build a map of an application in their mind. Once the path is broken they tend to return to the beginning and start over. But as long as they know where they are, they can freely move back, forth and across an application with ease.