| name | principle-experience-first |
| description | Apply when product, UX, or feature-scope tradeoffs come up. Choose user delight over implementation convenience; ship fewer polished features over more rough ones. |
| user-invocable | false |
Experience First
The product is the experience. Every technical decision either helps or hurts it. When implementation convenience conflicts with user delight, choose delight.
- Say no to 1,000 things (every feature, control, and option must earn its place)
- Ship less, ship better (polished experience with three features beats rough one with ten)
- Prototype before committing (design decisions are cheaper in throwaway HTML than production code)
- Sweat the details (transitions, alignment, spacing, feedback, error states)
- Tighten the core loop (every feature should serve the central workflow or get out of the way)
The user is whoever consumes the work. For a UI that is the end user. For a library or an internal API it is the colleague who imports it. The engineer who maintains the code next is a user too. Weigh their experience the same way, and explain impact from their seat.
Foundations should serve the experience, not the other way around. Foundational thinking governs the sequence of work; this principle governs the target.
