How have we come to a place where the simplest interactions feel complicated, tedious, and everything but well thought of?
Good design is not clever.
It is obvious, only after the fact.
Most frustration with everyday products comes from trying to be impressive instead of useful. A door that doesn't say push or pull. An app that hides the one thing you came for. A coffee machine that makes you tap a screen three times before it'll let you order a coffee. None of this requires genius to fix — only attention, and the willingness to notice what was already working before.
This is a small, slow practice of thinking about things before making them. Six principles to start. We'll add more when we find them, and remove any that don't hold up.
Each principle answering a different question about the same problem: what it does, why it exists, who it serves, where it lands, when it should slow down, and how any of it is supposed to work.
A good product does the thing you came for, then gets out of the way. That sounds obvious. It mostly isn't. The coffee machine that needs an app. The airline site that buries the check-in button. The settings screen you have to find before you can do the one thing you actually wanted. None of these are hard to fix. They just require someone to notice that the product stopped solving the problem and started adding to it.
Every button, every screen, every feature is there because someone put it there. The question worth asking — before adding anything — is why. Not why it could be there, or why a user once asked for something like it. Why it is. Most things don't have a good answer. That's fine. It means they can go.
Design decisions have a beneficiary. It's worth knowing which one. Self-checkout saves labour. Cookie banners protect legal teams. App-only features build databases. None of that is automatically wrong — but calling it an improvement for users is a small, fairly common lie. Know who actually gains from the decision. The design gets more honest after that, and usually simpler.
The same solution in a different place is a different problem. A form that works at a desk doesn't work on a phone on a train. An interface designed for someone with time doesn't work for someone in a hurry. Context isn't a layer you add later — it's the starting point. Where is this being used? By whom? Under what conditions? Get those wrong and the rest doesn't matter much.
Some things should take a moment. Deleting a year of messages. Sending money somewhere new. Closing an account for good. A pause there isn't poor design — it's the design working. Not everything should be frictionless. Speed is a reward for low-stakes actions. For the high-stakes ones, a little resistance is the product doing exactly what it should.
Not by following a system. Not by applying a framework or citing a principle. By looking at what's actually in front of you and asking whether it works — for the person who has to use it, in the place they have to use it, at the moment they need it. Most good design comes from that kind of attention. Most bad design comes from the absence of it. Common sense isn't clever. It doesn't have a portfolio. It just notices what isn't working and refuses to leave it that way.
Six principles, following six questions to answer when designing