Universal Principles of Design, Revised and Updated: 125 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions, and Teach through Design

The flexibility-usability tradeoff exists because accommodating flexibility entails satisfying a larger set of design requirements, which invariably means more compromises and complexity in the design.1

Pictures are remembered better than words.1

The process of using spatial and environmental information to navigate to a destination.1 Whether navigating a college campus, the wilds of a forest, or a Web site, the basic process of wayfinding involves the same four stages: Orientation, Route Decision, Route Monitoring, and Destination Recognition.

Consider design by committee when quality, error mitigation, and stakeholder acceptance are primary factors. Consider design by dictator when an aggressive timeline is the primary factor. Favor

is said that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. This suggests that the weakest link in a chain is also the least valuable and most expendable link—a liability to the system that should be reinforced, replaced, or removed. However, the weakest element in a system can be used to protect other more important elements, essentially making th

Consider desire lines in projects that emphasize usability. When possible, use creative methods to detect desire lines prior to finalizing design specifications.

Items and opportunities become more desirable when they are perceived to be in short supply or occur infrequently.

This impression is largely formed at the entry point to a system or environment.

A tendency to perceive women wearing red as more attractive and men wearing red as more dominant.

To promote associations of high value, favor minimalism for affluent and well-educated audiences and horror vacui for poorer and less-educated audiences, and vice versa. For information-rich media such as newspapers and websites, employ information-organizing principles such as alignment and chunking to retain the benefits of information-dense page