Design Principles are an assortment of considerations that form the foundation of any good product design. You can find many articles online listing various principles, but often they lack concrete examples from products we encounter daily. Here are ten principles that can help you create more usable, effective, and immersive designs.
As the flexibility of a system increases, its usability decreases.
Flexible designs support more functions and satisfy a wider set of requirements, but they perform those functions less efficiently than specialized tools.
When balancing flexibility versus usability, consider how well the needs of the users are understood, and how likely they are to evolve or change. Flexible products come with significant costs in terms of complexity, usability, adoption time, and investment requirements.
Adobe Photoshop is widely used by designers, graphic artists, photographers, and creative professionals. With every new version of the Photoshop feature set was expanding to accommodate a larger set of use cases, this resulted in a highly flexible but complex user interface. On the contrary, Figma is purposefully built for UI design and has a very lean feature set. Its minimalistic interface can be fully leveraged without much training.
