Author: Yves Béhar

Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20170624075744/https://www.fastcodesign.com/3067632/10-principles-for-design-in-the-age-of-ai

Principles:

• Design solves an important human problem: Technology should address genuine human needs rather than exist for its own sake. Start with the problem, not the technology.
• Design is context specific (it doesn't follow historical cliches): Avoid defaulting to familiar forms or conventions. Each design challenge deserves a response shaped by its unique circumstances.
• Design enhances human ability (without replacing the human): Products should thoughtfully augment people rather than substitute for them. Support and extend what humans can do naturally.
• Good design works for everyone, everyday: Technology shouldn't just please the person who installed it. It must be present and useful for everyone who encounters it.
• Good tech and design is discreet: Create invisible interfaces that inform and assist without demanding attention. The best technology stays out of the way.
• Good design is a platform that grows with needs and opportunities: Design systems that can evolve through software updates. Products should improve over time rather than remain static.
• Good design brings about products and services that build long-term relationships (but don't create emotional dependency): Create loyalty through genuine improvement, not manipulation. Products should earn continued use by getting better.
• Good technology design learns and predicts human behaviour: Use machine learning to anticipate needs and proactively assist, rather than waiting passively for instructions.
• Good design accelerates new ideas: Great design can pull futuristic concepts into reality faster. Designers should push innovation forward, not hold it back.
• Good design removes complexity from life: Simplify daily experiences rather than adding cognitive burden. Technology should make life easier, not more complicated.

Author: Codecademy.com

Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20250210201314/https://medium.com/about-codecademy/reimagining-codecademy-com-1ebd994e2c08

Principles:

• One Column: Whenever possible, we have constrained our entire content to a single-column layout. This helped us focus on the core purpose of the page, while also giving us more control over our narrative. A one column layout was also easier to implement within our first responsive design system, by minimizing variation between different screens and form factors, such as mobile and tablet.
• Social Proof: We never want to be arrogant, pretentious and dull in talking about ourselves, the features we have just launched, or how the product can change your life. In our new redesign we rely more frequently on our users and community to convey the benefits of Codecademy and the impact it had in their lives via quotes and testimonials.
• More Contrast: Something you’ll notice straight away in our new design is that we use color quite sparingly, and normally with a very defined purpose. For most part, color is associated with specific actions: hover states, primary and secondary buttons and controls. This way we can guarantee that our calls to action are very prominent and distinguishable from other surrounding elements.
• Fewer Form Fields: All of us know how tiring, frustrating, and sometimes exasperating, it can be to fill long forms of personal information. Whenever we require input from our users we have tried to minimize the number questions and forms fields. Overall, this measure also tends to increase conversion rates and reduce users’ typing fatigue.
• Keeping Focus: We have always tried to reduce the number of calls to action in a single page, since we want users to focus on what matters the most, while also being able to single out the primary activity. One of our favorite design principles is Hick’s Law, which says that time it takes for a user to make a decision depends on the number of choices available — the higher the number the longer the decision time.
• Direct Manipulation: Whenever we have to decide between content (what users want to read, consume, and act upon) and chrome (actions, controls, and navigation), our answer is very swift: content should come first. As much as possible, we have allowed users to directly act upon UI elements for further contextual actions and controls, and in the process considerably minimize the amount of links and chrome on a page.
• Visual Hierarchy: Visual hierarchy is critical to any graphic designer’s work, and we have looked at it very closely when redesigning our 70+ pages. We have used typography, color and area to provide users with a clear content order that respects white space and recurrently gives their eyes a place to rest. Overall, we want the implicit hierarchy of each page to be immediately perceived, in order to improve its message and legibility.
• Visual Recognition: We all know that humans are much better at recognizing things they have previously seen or experienced, than recalling them from memory. This is why we have introduced throughout our ecosystem (Profile, Dashboard, Track overview) snapshots of users’ in-progress projects. This way we can comfort users with visual elements they are familiar with, whenever they want to continue where they left off.
• Larger Targets: Another great universal design principle we love is Fitts’s Law, which essentially says that the time required to move and interact with a target area is a function of the distance and size of the target. The closer and larger the target, the faster the action. This is why we have increased the size of many UI elements, such as form fields, buttons, cards and links. Overall, it improves general usability (Fitts’s Law) and ease of use in touch-enabled platforms.
• Design for Edge Cases: We know how intimidating and lonely an out of the box digital experience can be, where many features might still be disabled for newcomers. As part of our redesign, we wanted to optimize our first time user experience, to feel like a rich, welcoming place, where users feel confident in exploring further. From our Dashboard to our Profile, we want users to always feel welcomed, even if they have just joined us.

Author: Highways England Strategic Design Panel

Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/645302/Design_Panel_progress_report.pdf#page=4

Principles:

• makes roads safe and useful: Safety is paramount. Roads must serve their purpose while protecting all users, including pedestrians and cyclists.
• is inclusive: Design for everyone who uses the road, regardless of age, ability, or mode of transport.
• makes roads understandable: Road layouts should be intuitive. Users should know what to do without confusion or excessive signage.
• fits in context: Respect the landscape and local character. Roads should feel like they belong in their environment.
• is restrained: Avoid overdesign. Use only what's necessary and resist adding elements that don't serve a clear purpose.
• is thorough: Consider every detail and how elements work together. Quality comes from attention to the whole.
• is environmentally sustainable: Minimise environmental impact during construction and operation. Support biodiversity and reduce carbon.
• is innovative: Embrace new ideas and technologies that improve outcomes. Challenge established approaches when better solutions exist.
• is long-lasting: Build for durability and future maintenance. Consider how the road will age and adapt over decades.
• is a collaborative process: Involve communities, specialists, and stakeholders throughout. Good design emerges from diverse perspectives.

Author: Vitaly Friedman

Source: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/01/10-principles-of-effective-web-design/

Principles:

• Don't Make Users Think: Make web pages obvious and self-explanatory. Reduce question marks through clear structure, visual clues, and recognizable links.
• Don't Squander Users' Patience: Keep user requirements minimal. Remove barriers and don't force registrations before users can explore and test features.
• Manage To Focus Users' Attention: Use visual elements strategically to guide attention to specific areas. Less thinking behind scenes means better user experience.
• Strive For Feature Exposure: Make functions clearly visible through visually appealing 1-2-3-done steps and large buttons. Well-understood content makes users comfortable.
• Make Use Of Effective Writing: Use short, scannable phrases with plain, objective language. Avoid cute names, marketing jargon, and exaggerated statements.
• Strive For Simplicity: Keep it simple as the primary goal. Users look for information despite design, not because of it. Simplicity over complexity.
• Don't Be Afraid Of The White Space: Use whitespace to reduce cognitive load and help users perceive information. Hierarchical structures with whitespace are easier to scan.
• Communicate Effectively With A "Visible Language": Organize with clear structure, economize with minimal cues, and communicate matching user capabilities. Use max 3 typefaces and sizes.
• Conventions Are Our Friends: Follow established conventions to reduce learning curve and gain user confidence. Innovate only when you have a better idea.
• Test Early, Test Often: Apply the TETO-principle to every project. Testing one user early is better than testing 50 near the end. Testing is iterative.

Author: Gary L. Neilson, Jaime Estupiñán, and Bhushan Sethi

Source: https://www.strategy-business.com/article/00318

Principles:

• Declare amnesty for the past: Don't get caught up debating old structures. Collectively decide to move on rather than blame or justify previous designs.
• Design with "DNA.": Use the eight universal building blocks—decisions, norms, motivators, commitments, information, mind-sets, structure, networks—to create integrated designs.
• Fix the structure last, not first: Structure should be the capstone, not cornerstone. Changing org charts in isolation leads to temporary gains that quickly revert.
• Make the most of top talent: Place your best people where they can have the greatest impact on your distinctive capabilities.
• Focus on what you can control: Don't waste energy on constraints you can't change. Direct attention to elements within your influence.
• Promote accountability: Make it easy for people to own their work. Clear decision rights and information flow matter more than structure.
• Benchmark sparingly, if at all: Copying competitors ignores your unique capabilities. Even similar companies need different designs for different strategies.
• Let the "lines and boxes" fit your company's purpose: Structure should serve strategy. Design reporting relationships around what your organisation needs to do well.
• Accentuate the informal: Formal structures only go so far. Networks, norms, and culture often determine how work actually gets done.
• Build on your strengths: Identify what your organisation does distinctively well and design to amplify those capabilities.

Author: Susan Weinschenk and Jordi Sánchez

Source: https://uxmag.com/articles/psychological-usability-heuristics

Principles:

• People Don't Want to Work or Think More Than They Have To: The system doesn't require more user work than needed. The system shows the information in little bits (progressive disclosure). Examples are shown (additionally to descriptions). The objects on the screen have right affordances; clickable things look clickable. The system doesn't provide more features to the user than needed. Good default values are provided.
• People Have Limitations: In every moment, just the indispensable information is provided in the screen. The information is easy to scan. Headers and short blocks of info or text are used. The system doesn't require the user to multi-task. Text lines have a suitable length: people prefer short ones, but they read better with longer ones.
• People Make Mistakes: The system is prepared for user errors, anticipates what they will be, and tries to prevent them. User confirmation is required before committing actions with severe results in case of error. It's easy to undo. Errors are prevented rather than shown and corrected. Error-prone tasks are broken up into smaller chunks. If the system can correct a user error, it does so and shows what it did. The development of the interface includes several iterations, user feedback and testing.
• Human Memory Is Complicated: The system is not fully based on user memories. Users aren't required to remember things from one task to another. Users aren't required to remember more than 3-4 items at a time.
• People are Social: The system supports social uses of its features. Users can look to others for guidance or recommendation. The system takes advantage of multiple users doing some tasks at the same time. Before asking the users to do something, the system gives them something they want. The system shows people doing something when the users are required to do it. Social uses of the system are based in a maximum of 150 strong ties for a single user, but support thousands of weak ties.
• Attention: Users' attention is grabbed and held in the right moments; users aren't distracted when they are paying attention to something important. The system uses different or novel objects in the interface when it wants the user to pay attention. The system doesn't relies on users noticing every change in the interface. To grab the attention, the system uses bright colors, large fonts, beeps and tones. The system doesn't unnecessarily distract users.
• People Crave Information: The system takes advantage of users seeking (food, sex, information, etc.). The system provides more information to the users when they ask for it. The system provides enough feedback to tell the user what is going on.
• Unconscious Processing: The system takes unconscious processing into consideration. When users are required to commit a large action, they are first required to commit a smaller one. The system uses food, sex and danger messages properly to grab user's attention. Pictures of people and stories are used to induce emotional responses in the users. The system uses unconscious content properly to affect users' behaviour. The system takes users' unconscious decisions and users' rationalizations into consideration.
• People Create Mental Models: The system takes users' mental models into account. Tasks are designed taking previous users' mental models of every task into account. The system matches the users' mental model, or it teaches the users to have the right mental model of the system. Suitable metaphors are used to help users to get a conceptual model of the system. User research is done to get information about users' mental models.
• Visual System: Information is grouped to help focus and avoid cluttered interfaces. Related objects are close together. Fonts are large enough and easy to read. The system takes peripheral vision into consideration; the visual environment of important objects in the interface is coherent with it. There is good color contrast; red text on a blue background or viceversa is not used. Pictures of objects are descriptive enough; usually they are better if they are slightly angled and have the perspective of being slightly above. When color is used to show things that go together, another way to show the same information is used.

Author: Jakob Nielsen

Source: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/

Principles:

• Visibility of system status: The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time.
• Match between system and the real world: The system should speak the users' language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms. Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order.
• User control and freedom: Users often choose system functions by mistake and will need a clearly marked "emergency exit" to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialogue. Support undo and redo.
• Consistency and standards: Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform conventions.
• Error prevention: Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place. Either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action.
• Recognition rather than recall: Minimize the user's memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the dialogue to another. Instructions for use of the system should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate.
• Flexibility and efficiency of use: Accelerators — unseen by the novice user — may often speed up the interaction for the expert user such that the system can cater to both inexperienced and experienced users. Allow users to tailor frequent actions.
• Aesthetic and minimalist design: Dialogues should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in a dialogue competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility.
• Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors: Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution.
• Help and documentation: Even though it is better if the system can be used without documentation, it may be necessary to provide help and documentation. Any such information should be easy to search, focused on the user's task, list concrete steps to be carried out, and not be too large.

Author: Whitney Hess

Source: http://whitneyhess.com/blog/2009/11/23/so-you-wanna-be-a-user-experience-designer-step-2-guiding-principles/

Principles:

• Stay out of people's way: Don't interrupt users or create obstacles. Design intentional, obvious paths that allow people to complete tasks quickly and freely.
• Present few choices: More choices make decisions harder. Remove "nice to haves" and focus on necessary alternatives that greatly impact the outcome.
• Limit distractions: People can't multitask effectively. Design for consecutive tasks rather than concurrent ones to keep people focused on the task at hand.
• Group related objects near each other: Don't force people to jump between disparate areas for a single task. Organise related features and content areas together appropriately.
• Create a visual hierarchy that matches the user's needs: Give crucial elements the greatest prominence. Prioritise information and functionality to match real-world usage scenarios.
• Provide strong information scent: Use clear language and set proper expectations. If what people find doesn't match their prediction, they'll give up and go elsewhere.
• Provide signposts and cues: Never let people get lost. Keep them aware of where they are, where they came from, and where they're going at all times.
• Provide context: Communicate how everything interrelates. Keep the design self-contained and don't break people out of the experience unnecessarily.
• Avoid jargon: The experience is about the customer, not the business. Be clear, kind, and use widely understood terminology.
• Make things efficient: Prioritise efficiency for humans before computers. Streamlined design allows more to get done in the same time, demonstrating respect for customers.
• Use appropriate defaults: Preselected options minimise decisions and increase efficiency. Choose wisely—wrong defaults create more stress and processing time.
• Use constraints appropriately: Prevent errors rather than recovering from them. Proactively indicate what's not possible to guide successful interactions, but don't limit just for the machine's sake.
• Make actions reversible: No design prevents all errors. Ensure people can easily fix mistakes. Undo is the most powerful control you can give.
• Reduce latency: Respond to requests quickly or people will feel you're not listening. Delays in interfaces frustrate users.
• Provide feedback: Tell people you're working and offer the next step. Design is a conversation, not a monologue.
• Use emotion: Ease of use isn't the only measure—pleasure matters too. Add warmth, kindness, whimsy, or wit to make people feel engaged and energised.
• Less is more: Everything in the design should have a purpose. If it's not adding to the experience's positivity, remove it.
• Be consistent: Navigation, organisation, and metaphors must be predictable and reliable. Inconsistency feels disjointed and confusing. Consistency implies stability.
• Make a good first impression: You don't get a second chance. Make people comfortable, set clear expectations, and ease them into the process.
• Be credible and trustworthy: Earn confidence by doing what you say you'll do. Don't overpromise and underdeliver. Set expectations appropriately and follow through.

Author: 37 Signals

Principles:

• Useful is forever: Bells and whistles wear off, but usefulness never does. We build useful software that does just what you need and nothing you don’t.
• Great service is everything: We’re famous for fast and friendly customer service. We work hard to make sure we live up to that reputation every day.
• Clarity is king: Buzzwords, lingo, and sensationalized sales-and-marketing-speak have no place at 37signals. We communicate clearly and honestly.
• Our customers are our investors: Our customers fund our daily operations by paying for our products. We answer to them — not investors, the stock market, or a board of directors.
• The basics are beautiful: We’ll never overlook what really matters: The basics. Great service, ease of use, honest pricing, and respect for our customer’s time, money, and trust.
• No hidden fees or secret prices: We believe everyone is entitled to the best price we can offer. Our prices are public, published right on our site, and the same no matter who you are.
• Software should be easy: Our products are intuitive. You’ll pick them up in seconds or minutes, not hours, days or weeks. We don’t sell you training because you don’t need it.
• Long-term contracts are obscene: No one likes being locked into something they don’t want anymore. Our customers can cancel at any time, no questions asked. No setup/termination fees either.

Author: Adam Silver

Source: https://adamsilver.io/blog/4-design-principles-i-use-every-day-to-avoid-bad-ux-and-create-products-that-work-for-everyone/

Principles:

• Good design works for everyone: Designing for edge cases improves the experience for all users. Subtitles help in noisy environments, plain language aids experts too, and large click targets benefit everyone.
• Good design makes things obvious: The best solutions feel inevitable. Show navigation items instead of hiding them in hamburger menus, display hints inline rather than in tooltips.
• Good design puts users in control: Design for real life, not ideal workflows. Let users save progress, trigger menus on click not hover, and paginate instead of infinite scroll.
• Good design is lightweight: Slow interfaces cause stress and feel untrustworthy. Cut background videos, remove unnecessary tooltips, and show content inline instead of in carousels.

Author: Nielsen Norman Group

Source: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/homepage-design-principles/

Principles:

• Ensure Easy Access to the Homepage: The homepage is often considered the "front door" of a website, serving as a primary entry point and a vital anchor for visitors. While users don't always enter a website from the homepage, many return to it as a safe harbor when getting lost on a site. Thus, making your homepage easily accessible is essential.
• Communicate Who You Are and What You Do: First impressions matter. Treat your homepage as an elevator pitch to prospective customers, quickly and clearly conveying what your organization does and what users can accomplish on your site. Don't make people guess — studies indicate that failing to communicate a site's purpose at a glance causes potential customers to abandon the site.
• Reveal Content Through Examples: Think of your homepage as the entrance to a physical store. Just as customers rely on examples in brick-and-mortar stores to find what they need, homepages should showcase samples of the site's offerings. Doing so encourages further exploration and helps users quickly determine if the site contains what they're looking for.
• Prompt Actions and Navigations: The homepage often marks the beginning of a user's exploration and acts as a central hub linked to other pages. Therefore, it should clearly communicate available actions and guide users toward their next steps.
• Keep Homepages Simple: While homepages contain a variety of content and links, they should not be overly complex to avoid overwhelming users. Keep animated content to a minimum to eliminate distractions. Clutter and disorganization can damage homepage usability and erode the credibility of a brand.

Author: Whitney Hess

Source: http://whitneyhess.com/blog/2009/11/23/so-you-wanna-be-a-user-experience-designer-step-2-guiding-principles/

Principles:

• Understand the underlying problem before attempting to solve it: Your work should have purpose — addressing actual, urgent problems that people are facing. Make sure that you can clearly articulate the core of the issue before spending an ounce of time on developing the design. The true mark of an effective designer is the ability to answer “why?”. Don’t waste your time solving the wrong problems.
• Don’t hurt anyone: It is your job to protect people and create positive experiences. At the very minimum you must ensure that you do not cause any pain. The world is filled with plenty of anguish — make your life goal not to add to it.
• Make things simple and intuitive: Leave complexity to family dynamics, relationships, and puzzles. The things you create should be easy to use, easy to learn, easy to find, and easy to adapt. Intuition happens outside of conscious reasoning, so by utilizing it you are actually reducing the tax on people’s minds. That will make them feel lighter and likely a lot happier.
• Acknowledge that the user is not like you: What’s obvious to you isn’t necessarily obvious to someone else. Our thought processes and understanding of the world around us are deeply affected by our genetics, upbringing, religious and geographical culture, and past experiences. There is a very small likelihood that the people you are designing for have all the distinctive qualities that make you you. Don’t assume you innately understand the needs of your customers. How many people do you think truly understand what it feels like to be you?
• Have empathy: Empathy is the ability to understand and share another person’s perspective and feelings. Step outside your box and try really hard to understand the world from another person’s point of view. Go out of your way to identify with their needs. If certain things just don’t make sense to you, ask more questions. Ask as many questions as you need to until you finally understand. When you really get what makes people tick and why they do what they do, you’ll have a much easier time going to bat to make their lives better. If you aren’t trying to make people’s lives better, what are you even doing here?

Author: Fjord

Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20210225042105/https://wearablesguide.fjordnet.com/

Principles:

• Balance Public and Personal:
• Keep it Glanceable:
• Leverage Non-Visual UI:
• Beware of the Data Avalanche:
• Mind the Gaps:

Author: Tom Castle

Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20211201131945/http://tom-castle.com/incorporating-ai-into-design/

Principles:

• Design for People:
• Design for Transparent Value:
• Design for Failure:
• Design for Learning:
• Design for Ethics:

Author: Guillermo Rauch

Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20251115032000/https://rauchg.com/2014/7-principles-of-rich-web-applications

Principles:

• Server rendered pages are not optional: Server rendering is not about SEO, it’s about performance. Consider the additional roundtrips to get scripts, styles, and subsequent API requests. In the future, consider HTTP 2.0 “pushing” of resources.
• Act immediately on user input: JavaScript allows us to mask network latency altogether. Applying this as a design principle should even remove most spinners or “loading” messages from your applications. PJAX or TurboLinks miss out on opportunities to improve the perception of speed.
• React to data changes: When data changes on the server, let the clients know without asking. This is a form of performance improvement that frees the user from manual refresh actions (F5, pull to refresh). New challenges: (re)connection management, state reconciliation.
• Control the data exchange with the server: We can now fine-tune the data exchange with the server. Make sure to handle errors, retry on behalf of the user, sync data on the background and maintain offline caches.
• Don’t break history, enhance it: Without the browser managing URLs and history for us, new challenges emerge. Make sure not to break expectations related to scrolling. Keep your own caches for fast feedback.
• Push code updates: Pushing data without pushing code is insufficient. If your data updates automatically, so should your code. Avoid API errors and improve performance. Use stateless DOM for side-effect free repainting.
• Predict behavior: Negative latency.

Author: IBM

Source: https://developer.ibm.com/blockchain/2017/01/01/7-principles-for-designing-a-blockchain-network-to-power-and-sustain-your-business/

Principles:

• Network participants must have control of their business:
• The network must be extensible, with membership flexibility:
• The network must be permissioned but with competitive data protected:
• The network must allow open access and global collaboration:
• The network must be scalable for transaction processing and data encryption processing:
• The network must be secure and address new security challenges of a shared network:
• The network must co-exist with existing systems of record and transaction systems:

Author: Xplane

Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20181121041956/http://x.xplane.com:80/change-dna-overview

Principles:

• Clarity:
• Inspiration:
• Visual Alignment:
• Co-creation:
• Action:
• Transparency:
• Harmony:
• Resilience:

Author: Devhouse Spindle / Luuk Hartsema

Principles:

• Consistency: Embrace patterns and recognize that our usability is greatly improved when similar parts are expressed in similar ways. Interfaces that are consistent are more predictable, which means that they are easier to learn. Learnable interfaces feel more usable since less friction is involved.
• Functional: Our products are meant for intensive daily use, providing value efficiently. This is why our core interactions, the ones users engage daily, should feel streamlined and purged of unnecessary interactions. Think about what users want to do and help them complete those tasks in the easiest and most intuitive way possible. Consider the edge cases. Everyone at all levels of experience should feel like they know how to use the product, regardless of how many features they use. Empower everyone through progressive discoverability.
• Engaging: We value our users time more than our own. Involve users in the continuous quest to improve our products and keep them informed about changes. Having an overall good user experience will help users be enthusiastic and feel engaged with our products. Engaged users are willing to contribute and help us to make improvements.
• Focus: Our interface should promote the conditions needed for our users to enter a state of flow. Take out friction and distractions so users can stay focused on common tasks. Our users want to stay focused, and unless it’s critical, an interruption can be frustrating. When a user reaches a flow state, even just momentarily, they will feel motivated to keep going, productive, autonomous, and empowered.
• Honest: Be clear upfront about what’s happening and why. If something goes wrong, give clear recovery instructions but spare them the technical details. Be sincere and honest in the communication towards users. Celebrate achievements and be sensible about the user’s feelings and thoughts.
• Minimalistic: Building something simple is anything but simple. Eliminate ambiguity. Enable users to see, understand, and act with confidence. Seek to simplify the interface by removing unnecessary elements or content that does not support user tasks. Break complex tasks into smaller steps that can be easily accomplished. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it. Everything in the interface should serve a specific purpose.
• Fun & Playful: Functions must be intuitive and reliable before it can be fun for users. Delight users in surprising ways without hindering primary tasks. A carefully-placed animation, or a well-timed sound effect can be a joy to experience. Subtle effects contribute to a feeling of effortlessness and brings the interface to life.
• Human: Be gentle, be human. Interfaces must respond promptly to users in a human way so that the experience feels fast and like a real conversation. Every person is different. Take into account our products are being used by various type of users with different goals and various levels of knowledge.

Author: Design Council

Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20220127141553/https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/resources/guide/design-led-approach-infrastructure

Principles:

• Setting the scene:
• Multi-disciplinary teamwork:
• The bigger picture:
• Site masterplan:
• Landscape and visual impact assessment:
• Landscape design:
• Design approach:
• Materials and detailing:
• Sustainability:
• Visitor centre:

Author: Seek

Source: https://seek-oss.github.io/seek-style-guide/

Principles:

• Design with empathy: Understand our customers and end users better than they understand themselves.
• A Seek interaction is transparent, honest and trustworthy: A user experience at Seek should be true to the brand & true to how people want to be treated. “If we want users to like our software, we should design it to behave like a likeable person.” – Alan Cooper
• Use persuasive design to achieve business goals: It is not enough that our design is usable, it should be used in a way that encourages users towards the goals of SEEK. A registered user action is more valuable than an anonymous one, a searchable profile is more useful than a hidden one.
• Content is king: A person’s focus should be on their content, not on the UI. Help people work without interference.
• Simplicity is powerful: A minimalist form and function keeps users focused on their goals without distraction. It improves on-screen responsiveness as well as being suited to small-screen implementations.
• Data informs design: “One accurate measurement is worth more than a thousand expert opinions.” – Grace Hopper
• Consistency matters: Appearance follows behaviour (Form follows function). Designed elements should look like they behave—someone should be able to predict how an interface element will behave merely by looking at it. Embrace consistency, but not homogeneity. If something looks the same it should always act the same.
• Accessible design is good design: In principle Seek design should be usable on all devices by all of the people in all situations. Design is simple, touch friendly and clear and aims for AA accessibility.
• Make it mine: The jobseeking experience is highly personal one that takes place over extended periods of time. The experience should align to the way that users conduct their jobseeking, allowing them to continue where they left off.
• Don’t make users think: Observation shows that users do not read instructions. Interactions should be task focused, eliminating decision points and generally use one clear call to action.