<aside> ℹ️ Design principles are guidelines, biases and design considerations that designers apply with discretion. Professionals from many disciplines—e.g., behavioral science, sociology, physics and ergonomics—provided the foundation for design principles via their accumulated knowledge and experience.
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Design principles represent the accumulated wisdom of researchers and practitioners in design and related fields. When you apply them, you can predict how users will likely react to your design.
**The Robustness Principle:** Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept.
**The Pareto Principle:** 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.
**The Principle of Least Surprise:** When two elements of an interface conflict, or are ambiguous, the behaviour should be that which will least surprise the user.
**The DRY Principle:** Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.
**KISS Principle:** An example of a principle where you design for non-experts and therefore minimize any confusion your users may experience.
In user experience (UX) design, minimizing users’ cognitive loads and decision-making time is vital. The authors of Universal Principles of Design state that design principles should help designers find ways to improve usability, influence perception, increase appeal, teach users and make effective design decisions in projects.
For instance, you don’t automatically use a 3:1 header-to-text weight ratio to abide by the principle of good hierarchy. That ratio is a standard rule. Instead, a guideline you might use to implement a good hierarchy is “text should be easy to read.”
You should use discretion whenever you apply design principles to anticipate users’ needs – e.g., you judge how to guide the user’s eye using symmetry or asymmetry. Consequently, you adapt the principles to each case and build a solid experience as you address users’ needs over time.
Designers use principles such as visibility, find-ability and learnability to address basic human behaviors. We use some design principles to guide actions. Perceived affordances such as buttons are an example. That way, we put users in control of seamless experiences.