Good product design is not a single thing. It is not a colour palette or a component library. It is not a process or a tool. It is a set of values that a team holds and applies consistently across every decision, large and small. These are seven of the principles I return to most often.
Have you ever walked into a conference room full of stakeholders only to see middle-aged white men? When we design and build products for the real world, it is a requirement to have a team that is diverse to understand all angles and needs. Diversity of background, identity, ability, and perspective is not a nice-to-have — it is a design requirement.
Internal politics can break a team, product, or even a company. The antidote is radical transparency: fill the walls with designs, wireframes, personas, and any other documentation you have created. When everyone can see the work, assumptions get challenged earlier and trust compounds.
Sometimes it feels like I spend hours asking: "Do we really need all this text? All these features? All this complexity?" The answer is almost always no. Simplicity is not the absence of effort — it is the result of enormous effort applied in the right direction.
Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple. C.W. Ceram
I hope we all know by now that we need to test our designs and assumptions with users to make sure we build the right thing. Empathy means genuinely trying to understand someone else's experience — not projecting your own. The false-consensus effect is real and dangerous in product work.
The false-consensus effect refers to people's tendency to assume that others share their beliefs and behaviour. Raluca Budiu, Nielsen Norman Group
Design does not happen in isolation. When I studied UX design, we talked a lot about the difference between UX and UI. But the real distinction that matters is between designing alone and designing together. The best products I have worked on were deeply collaborative at every stage.
UI is the saddle, the stirrups, & the reins. UX is the feeling you get being able to ride the horse. Dain Miller
I have learned the power and importance of animations and interaction fidelity in software design. How something moves communicates almost as much as what it does. Static mockups lie. High-fidelity prototypes tell the truth.
In a world where your finger often covers the button you're pressing, animation plays a huge role in helping users understand what just happened. José Torre
In the beginning, you set a target goal for the product. But while you work, the world changes, users change, and your assumptions age. Validation is the discipline of checking your work against reality — not once at the end, but continuously throughout.
Good designers want to be proved wrong, bad designers hope to be proved right. Andy Budd