universal-design-principles

Use this skill when the design's perceived quality affects whether users will tolerate friction, give the product a chance, or judge it as well-made — which is most consumer-facing surfaces, marketing, onboarding, first-run, and any moment where an unfamiliar user is forming a quick judgment. Trigger when designing landing pages, sign-up flows, first-time UX, app store screenshots, demo videos, sales decks, or any surface where the user's first impression matters and friction is unavoidable. Also trigger when defending why "polish" matters on a working product, or when the user asks "should we ship the spartan version or invest in design?"

Use this skill whenever a design task involves the felt quality of an interface — beauty, polish, brand voice, persuasion, emotional response, marketing surfaces, hero sections, onboarding tone, empty/celebration states, illustrations, mascots, avatars. Trigger when the user mentions tone, polish, brand, "feels cold/cheap/premium," personality, voice, mascot, hero, "make it more delightful," or asks how a screen should make the user feel. Framework-agnostic. Routes the model to the right aesthetics principle in this plugin.

Use this skill when picking a brand archetype, propagating it across product and marketing surfaces, or auditing brand-voice consistency. Trigger when designing the voice of microcopy, marketing pages, support tone, or any brand-facing communication. Sub-aspect of `archetypes`; read that first.

Use this skill when designing brand voice, marketing positioning, mascot or character design, narrative arcs in product onboarding, or any expressive surface where the design must communicate personality. Trigger when picking how a brand "feels" (rebellious, nurturing, sage-like), when designing storytelling for marketing, or when reviewing why a brand voice feels generic. Archetypes is one of the foundational principles in 'Universal Principles of Design' (Lidwell, Holden, Butler 2003), grounded in Jung's analytical psychology and widely applied in branding, storytelling, and product personality.

Use this skill when designing narrative content — landing pages, case studies, onboarding flows, marketing campaigns, sales decks, ad arcs. Trigger when picking how to frame a customer story, when writing a launch campaign, or when the user mentions "this campaign feels flat" or "we need a better narrative." Sub-aspect of `archetypes`; read that first.

Apply the Exposure Effect (mere-exposure effect) — the well-documented finding that repeated exposure to something tends to increase liking for it. Use when launching new features, planning redesigns, building brand familiarity, or evaluating user resistance to change. Familiarity reads as comfort and trust; novelty reads as risk. The effect explains why redesigns generate disproportionate user backlash, why incremental change beats radical change, and why brand consistency over time builds value beyond any single design choice.

Use the exposure effect deliberately in onboarding and habit formation — getting users to repeated, low-friction encounters with the product so familiarity builds and preference forms. Use when designing onboarding flows, planning feature introductions, building user habits, or evaluating why users churn after first use. The exposure effect operates over time; products that get users to come back early benefit from accumulated familiarity that single-session products don't.

Manage the risks of redesigns when users have built up exposure-based preference for the existing design. Use when planning a major redesign, evaluating user backlash to changes, deciding between incremental and radical change, or recovering from a redesign that generated complaints. Users like what they're used to; redesigns must be planned to manage the transition cost. Even objectively-better redesigns trigger resistance disproportionate to the actual change.

Use this skill when applying the descriptive form-follows-function interpretation — functional clarity as a source of aesthetic quality. Trigger when designing tools, dashboards, or instrumental surfaces where every element should earn its presence. Sub-aspect of `form-follows-function`; read that first.

Use this skill when designing the visual or aesthetic layer of a product, deciding between expressive style and functional restraint, evaluating decorative elements, or arguing about whether a feature should ship plain vs. polished. Trigger when stakeholders ask "should we add visual flair to this?", when reviewing a design that "feels too decorated," or when picking between competing visual directions. Form Follows Function is one of the foundational principles in 'Universal Principles of Design' (Lidwell, Holden, Butler 2003) and one of the most-quoted dictums in design — but its meaning depends on which interpretation (descriptive vs. prescriptive) you take.

Use this skill when the team is in a form-vs-function debate and needs to step back to define what "success" actually means for the design. Trigger when stakeholders disagree about visual treatment, when a design feels off and no one can articulate why, or when reviewing a design against an unclear brief. Sub-aspect of `form-follows-function`; read that first.

Recognize and design against the cost of attention fragmentation — the disproportionate damage that even small interruptions do to focused work. Use when designing notification systems, evaluating whether a feature should interrupt the user, planning feature introductions, or auditing a product for unintended attention costs. The cost of breaking immersion is much higher than designers usually estimate; restraint in interruption is one of the most user-respectful design moves.

Design for flow specifically — calibrate challenge to skill, provide immediate feedback, set clear goals, foreground the activity. Use when designing tools for skilled work (writing, drawing, programming, music), games, learning experiences, or any context where sustained engagement is the goal. Flow is the most-researched aspect of immersion; the conditions for it are specific and the design moves that support it are well-documented.

Apply the principle of Immersion — designing for sustained focus and engagement, where the user becomes absorbed in the activity and loses awareness of the surrounding environment. Use when designing for creative work, deep reading, gameplay, learning, or any activity that benefits from extended focused attention. Immersion requires removing distractions, providing clear feedback, calibrating challenge to skill, and respecting the user's flow state. Modern attention-driven products often work against immersion in pursuit of engagement metrics; designs that genuinely serve immersion are increasingly distinctive.

Design intentional imperfection that reads as warmth — subtle asymmetry, hand-drawn elements, organic textures, intentional irregularities. Use when adding human warmth to a digital design, distinguishing from competitors with uniform design systems, designing for personal or creative contexts. The skill is making imperfection look intentional and refined rather than sloppy or broken; the line between "designed warmth" and "looks unfinished" is narrow.

Apply wabi-sabi restraint — the discipline of leaving things out, of resisting decoration, of letting empty space and silence do design work. Use when designing reading-focused interfaces, paring back accumulated clutter, choosing between decoration and absence, or evaluating whether each element earns its place. Restraint is the often-overlooked half of wabi-sabi: the imperfection side gets attention, but the principle is equally about modesty and the elegance of what's not there.

Apply the principle of Wabi-Sabi — the aesthetic embrace of imperfection, impermanence, and naturalness. Use when designing for warmth and authenticity, creating spaces that feel lived-in rather than sterile, choosing handcrafted-feeling materials over machined perfection, or evaluating whether a design feels too polished and impersonal. Wabi-sabi resists the digital-design tendency toward pixel-perfect uniformity in favor of subtle asymmetry, organic textures, and the visible mark of process. Used appropriately, it produces designs that feel human; used reflexively, it produces fake-looking sloppiness.

Use this skill when scoping a roadmap, prioritizing features, planning an MVP, or deciding what to ship and what to defer. Trigger when the user asks "what should we build next?", "is this feature worth it?", "should we ship feature X?", or when reviewing a feature backlog. Sub-aspect of `80-20-rule`; read that first.

Use this skill when scoping a redesign or refactor — choosing which existing surfaces deserve full attention and which can be left mostly alone. Trigger when the user asks "where should we focus our redesign?", "do we need to redo all of this?", or when planning incremental design improvements with limited capacity. Sub-aspect of `80-20-rule`; read that first.

Use this skill whenever the design has many features, controls, or content elements and decisions about which to prioritize matter — feature roadmaps, redesign scoping, IA decisions, dashboard design, settings page audits, marketing content prioritization, or any design with many candidates competing for attention. Trigger when the user asks "what should we focus on?", "should we add another feature?", "what can we cut?", or when reviewing a UI cluttered with rarely-used controls. The 80/20 rule (Pareto principle) is one of the foundational principles in 'Universal Principles of Design' (Lidwell, Holden, Butler 2003) and one of the most quoted across design, business, and engineering.

Use this skill when designing or fixing long forms that ask the user for many fields — sign-up flows, profile setup, settings panels, checkout, intake forms, applications. Trigger when forms exceed ~6 fields, when users complain forms are "too long," when seeing high mid-form drop-off, or when picking how to break a form into sections. Sub-aspect of `chunking`; read that first.

Use this skill when designing inputs or displays for numeric strings — phone numbers, OTP / verification codes, credit card numbers, account IDs, license keys, currency, dates, social security numbers. Trigger when picking a format for displaying numbers, designing OTP entry UIs, or formatting identifiers in tables and receipts. Sub-aspect of `chunking`; read that first.

Use this skill whenever the user must hold a sequence of items in working memory — phone numbers, OTP codes, account IDs, address strings, multi-step instructions, long forms, navigation menus with many items. Trigger when designing OTP / verification UIs, formatting numeric strings, breaking long forms into sections, grouping nav items, or reviewing surfaces that "have too many things at once." Chunking is one of the foundational principles in 'Universal Principles of Design' (Lidwell, Holden, Butler 2003), grounded in Miller's classic working-memory research.

Use this skill whenever a design task involves cognition, mental models, learnability, complexity reduction, defaults, memory, scanning, or comprehension — regardless of framework or platform. Trigger when the user is designing forms, settings, onboarding, dashboards with many widgets, complex tables, navigation IA, search experiences, or any flow that has many options or asks the user to learn something new. Trigger when the user mentions "too complex," "too many options," "users keep getting confused," defaults, labels, copy, mental models, progressive disclosure, autocomplete, or ergonomics. Routes the model to the right cognition principle in this plugin.

Apply external consistency — honoring conventions from outside your product (platform conventions, category conventions, established interaction patterns) so users can transfer their learning into your product. Use when designing for a specific platform (iOS, Android, web), entering an established product category (calendar, email, file manager), choosing icons or gestures, or deciding when to follow vs. lead a convention. External consistency reduces the learning cost for new users; deviating from it requires both a strong reason and explicit framing.

Apply internal consistency — making your product coherent with itself across all surfaces, components, and flows. Use when designing or auditing component libraries, defining design tokens, settling cross-team naming conventions, planning a design-system rollout, integrating acquired or legacy code, or evaluating whether two features should share or diverge in their interaction model. Internal consistency is enforced through design systems, shared vocabularies, and process discipline; it erodes through hand-off losses, sprint-driven shortcuts, and team boundaries that don't coordinate.

Apply the principle of Consistency — making similar things look and behave similarly so users can transfer learning across the interface. Use when designing component libraries, defining naming conventions, choosing whether to invent or borrow patterns, auditing across surfaces (web, mobile, email, support docs), or evaluating whether two features should share or diverge in their interaction model. Strong consistency reduces cognitive load and learnability cost; aggressive consistency can flatten meaningful differences. There are four kinds — aesthetic, functional, internal, external — each with different applications.

Use this skill when the question is what to *pre-select* in a list of options — radio groups, dropdowns, configuration UIs, plan pickers, sign-up flows, settings. A strong default is the highest-leverage Hick's Law mitigation: most users accept the default, paying almost no decision cost. Trigger when picking what's selected on first load, when stakeholders argue "shouldn't we let the user choose?", when designing wizards or onboarding, or when a UI has many options but most users want the same one. Sub-aspect of `hicks-law`; read that first if you haven't already.

Use this skill when designing menus, dropdowns, navigation, command palettes, or any interface where the user picks from a list. Trigger when the menu has more than ~7 items, when navigation feels overwhelming, when designing a cmd-K palette, when picking what goes in a "More" overflow, or when arguing about whether to add another menu item. Sub-aspect of `hicks-law`; read that first if you haven't already.

Use this skill when designing pricing tables, plan pickers, tier selectors, or any conversion surface where the choice itself is the conversion event. Trigger when laying out 3-tier or 4-tier pricing, when arguing about whether to add a fourth plan, when designing the "Choose your plan" step of onboarding, or when fixing low conversion on a pricing page. Pricing pages are a special Hick's Law case: the decision is the entire purpose of the page, and decision fatigue equals lost revenue. Sub-aspect of `hicks-law`; read that first if you haven't already.

Use this skill whenever a design has many options the user must choose among — menus, navigation, pickers, plan tiers, settings panels, action toolbars, lists of templates, anything that asks "which one?" Trigger when the user is laying out a navigation menu, designing a settings page, picking the structure of a wizard, building a country/timezone/currency picker, designing a pricing table, or reviewing a UI where users hesitate over which control to use. Trigger when there's debate about "should we add another option?" — Hick's Law is the principle that costs the option a price. Routes to sub-aspect skills for menus, defaults, and pricing.

Apply arbitrary and symbolic icon design — using forms with no inherent meaning that depend on convention to communicate (the hamburger menu, the kebab menu, the AI sparkle, app brand-mark icons). Use when a function has no clear visual referent, when working within a domain that has its own icon vocabulary, when establishing or following a convention, or when evaluating whether a convention is strong enough to support icon-only treatment. Arbitrary icons require prior learning to work; the skill is calibrating when to follow a convention vs. when to label.

Apply iconic representation — using simplified visual symbols to communicate function, status, or category at a glance. Use when designing icon sets, choosing between icon and text labels, evaluating whether to lean on existing iconography (resemblance to a known object) or invent symbolic icons (arbitrary forms with assigned meanings), or auditing whether your icons are actually communicating. Three kinds: similar (icons that look like what they represent), example (icons that depict an object associated with the function), and arbitrary/symbolic (forms with no inherent meaning, like the hamburger menu).

Apply iconic resemblance — designing or choosing icons that visually look like what they represent. Use when picking icons for actions or objects with strong visual referents (camera, clock, lock, calendar), evaluating whether a custom icon is communicating, or testing whether your icon set actually conveys meaning to your audience. Resemblance is the strongest form of icon recognition because it requires no prior learning; it fails when the function has no visual referent or when the audience doesn't recognize the object being depicted.

Use this skill when designing onboarding, when diagnosing why users keep getting confused, when migrating users from one product convention to another, or when the system genuinely differs from familiar comparable products. Trigger when the user mentions "users don't get it," "we keep getting the same support tickets," or "this is a new pattern they need to learn." Sub-aspect of `mental-model`; read that first.

Use this skill whenever the design will be used by people who bring prior expectations — which is essentially every design. Trigger when designing onboarding, when picking metaphors (folders, channels, projects), when reviewing why users keep getting confused, when migrating from one product convention to another, or when the user mentions "users don't understand," "they keep doing X wrong," or "we're inventing something new." Mental Model is one of the foundational principles in 'Universal Principles of Design' (Lidwell, Holden, Butler 2003) and grounds most modern user-experience design.

Use this skill when distinguishing the two mental-model types — system models (how the user thinks the system works) and interaction models (how the user thinks they should use it). Trigger when designing onboarding (which model to teach), reviewing user confusion (which model is wrong), or building documentation (which model to explain). Sub-aspect of `mental-model`; read that first.

Apply behavioral mimicry — making an interface element behave like a familiar physical object so the user's physical-world intuitions transfer to the digital interaction. Use when designing gestures, animations, transitions, drag-and-drop, scroll behaviors, or any interaction where physical-world analogies could clarify the experience. Behavioral mimicry is more durable than visual skeuomorphism — physics-mimicking behaviors age well — but it requires deliberate calibration: too much physical fidelity slows the interaction down without communicating anything new.

Apply the principle of Mimicry — borrowing the form, behavior, or visual language of something familiar to make a new design recognizable. Use when introducing a novel feature whose function would be opaque without an analogy, choosing between metaphor and convention, designing for a category your users already know, or evaluating whether a "skeuomorphic" element helps or hurts. Mimicry comes in surface (visual resemblance), behavioral (acts like the source), and functional (does what the source does) forms. Used well, it accelerates learning; used badly, it carries forward limitations the new medium doesn't share.

Apply surface mimicry — making an interface element look like a familiar physical object to communicate its purpose at a glance. Use when introducing a control or container that has no native UI vocabulary, designing a niche product that benefits from a recognizable visual reference (a journal that looks like a journal, a wallet that looks like a wallet), or evaluating whether visual skeuomorphism is communicating or just decorating. Surface mimicry is most useful for novice users in unfamiliar mediums; it becomes anachronistic as the source fades or as users learn the abstract conventions.