NI Design Tenets

National Instruments' design framework emphasizing respect for design history, user trust, focused interactions, and careful interpretation of user intent for engineering software experiences.

  1. Respect the History

  2. Stay Trustworthy

  3. Direct Focus

  4. Be Cautious When Assuming User Intent

  5. Promote Confidence

  6. Progressive Disclosure

  7. Encourage Direct Manipulation

  8. Provide Batch Operations, and Promote Property Inheritance

  9. Provide the Appropriate Level of "Scrappiness"

Help needed for "NI Design Tenets"!

The following is missing from this set of principles:

Summary: Each design principle can have a brief summary, these could be a couple of lines or a detailed paragraph outlining how this principle is used or measured, e.g.

- principle: Strive to be universal
summary: Our aim is to be a resource that is helpful to everyone. We do this by strictly adhering to principles of progressive enhancement…

Tip! You may be able to find the missing information at the source URL:
https://ni.github.io/design-system/design-tenets/.

It would be great if you could contribute and update this set of principles with anything that's missing!

Related principles

Practical guidance for
better design decisions

Sign up for occasional guidance, examples, and updates on using design principles in practice.

    Built with Kit

    No spam. Unsubscribe any time.

    principles.design is created and curated by Ben Brignell.

    Know a set of design principles that should be here? Submit an example.

    © 2017-2026 Brignell Ltd