My design principles

• Principles are expressions that guide one's decision-making, so they may move forward along a predictable, sustainable path.
• Princples articulate fundamental goals that all decisions can be measured against.
• Candidly, I've used these ideas & phrases thousands of times over the years because I truly believe in them. I'm excited to finally start putting pen to paper on these beliefs.

• Within every piece of feedback, there is something of value.
• Don't get me wrong, some feedback lacks serious credibility and can derail you. But there is usually something there that can has some value.

For example, someone might say: "Can you make the box smaller, it looks chunky."
The takeaway here is not that the box should be smaller, but that the box is maybe more visually prominent than it needs to be.

• This one is fairly simple: Users interact the most with things that are right in front of them.
• Additionally, don't expect users to hunt and peck through your clunky UI to accomplish their goal.
• On the flip side, if you want to drive engagement towards a function, try surfacing that functionality (and it's purpose) at a higher level in your platform.

For example, I expressed this idea at Charter years ago when we were rethinking the Product Page. The watchlist functionality saw abysmal usage metrics. My hunch was that's because the functionality was nested into a "More Info" tab. When we surfaced watchlisting to a higher level within the new design, we saw a 30% increase in watchlisted titles.

• Users can only understand what's presented in front of them.
• We can't expect to fully understand a user's problem through an extremely tech-literate lens.
• This ultimately comes back to prioritizing empathy.

For example, if a user interacts with your site on a slow connection they might say "this website is slow." The user's perception is that the website is slow, therefore the reality that they are experiencing is that the website is slow. Even though it's their connection that is the primary problem, it's our job to change their perception which then impacts their reality.