Experience First

The product is the experience. Technical choices are good when they make the real consumer's work clearer, faster, safer, or more satisfying.

The consumer may be an end user, library caller, operator, teammate, or the next maintainer. Judge the change from their seat, not from the easiest implementation path.

Find The Core Workflow

Name who uses the change and what they are trying to accomplish. Follow their path from starting point to successful outcome, including the feedback that tells them what happened.

• Keep the common path obvious and short.
• Treat empty, loading, error, permission, and recovery states as part of the experience.
• Prefer real use or a realistic usage example over assumptions about what is convenient.

Make Additions Earn Their Place

Every feature, control, option, setting, abstraction, and configuration point must help the consumer complete the core workflow. Remove, defer, or simplify anything that does not.

• Prefer a few complete, polished workflows over many partial ones.
• Do not expose internal machinery, generic flexibility, or implementation shortcuts when the consumer needs one clear action.
• Choose sensible defaults when they remove a decision without hiding a meaningful tradeoff.
• Keep useful lower-level control where consumers have a real, demonstrated need for it.

Decide Through The Consumer's Experience

When implementation convenience conflicts with a clearer or more reliable experience, favor the experience within the bounds of correctness, safety, accessibility, and explicit requirements.

For a library or internal API, a caller needing conversions, sequencing knowledge, or workarounds is experience debt. For a product interface, a user needing to guess, recover from a silent failure, or navigate unused controls is experience debt. Fix the owning shape when the problem is systemic.

Make Uncertain Choices Cheap

When an interaction, workflow, or visual direction is uncertain, explore the experience before committing to production structure. Use the smallest artifact that can answer the decision, then keep only the direction that improves the core workflow.

Do not polish a weak flow into permanence. First remove friction and unused scope, then refine details such as hierarchy, feedback, spacing, transitions, and error handling.

Review From The Outside

Before finishing, answer:

1. Who consumes this, and what are they trying to achieve?
2. Does the common path become simpler, more obvious, or more trustworthy?
3. What can be removed, deferred, or made a default?
4. Can the consumer tell what happened and recover when it does not work?
5. Did implementation convenience introduce experience debt?

Source

Adapted from Pstack's Experience First principle.