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5 Principles That Stuck with Me After Reading Universal Principles of Design

Simon Li
Bootcamp
Published in
5 min readAug 5, 2024

Universal Principles of Design is a book that I should’ve read earlier as a product designer. It gave me new perspectives in thinking about the tricky design problems or situations I encountered in the past, and new ideas on how to approach a design project in the future. Below are 5 principles that stuck with me after I read this book.

https://amzn.to/4daxHZ1

Performance ≠ Preference

The best performing design is not necessarily the most preferred one. The Dovrak keyboard layout is such an example. What leads to a preferred design is often a combination of factors rather than just performance: Is it pleasing to look at? Does it follow or go against existing standard-of-use?…

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_keyboard_layout, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colemak

So if we created a well performing product but it fails to gain momentum or market share, perhaps it’s time to drop our attachment and exam the reality. To obtain reliable information on preference versus performance, we can observe how users interact with different designs in context, as the book suggests.

This principle also tells us that we should never ask users directly whether they’d like to have a…

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