Individual skill

design-everyday-things

Apply foundational design principles: affordances, signifiers, constraints, feedback, and conceptual models. Use when the user mentions "why is this confusing", "affordance", "error prevention", "discoverability", "human-centered design", "mental model", "mapping", "seven stages of action", "users keep making mistakes", "this is unintuitive", or "people cant figure out how to use it". Also trigger when reducing product complexity or feature creep. Covers the gulfs of execution and evaluation. For usability scoring, see ux-heuristics. For iOS-specific patterns, see ios-hig-design.

plugins/product-innovation/skills/design-everyday-things/SKILL.md

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SKILL.mdcore · 15,994 bytes
references/affordances.mddoc · 13,207 bytes
references/case-studies.mddoc · 16,231 bytes
references/conceptual-models.mddoc · 16,061 bytes
references/constraints.mddoc · 13,886 bytes
references/feedback.mddoc · 15,517 bytes
references/human-error.mddoc · 16,310 bytes
references/mappings.mddoc · 13,714 bytes
references/seven-stages.mddoc · 15,091 bytes
references/signifiers.mddoc · 14,110 bytes
references/two-gulfs.mddoc · 12,282 bytes

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# Design of Everyday Things Framework

Foundational design principles for creating products that are intuitive, discoverable, and understandable. The "bible of UX" — applicable to physical products, software, and any human-designed system.

## Core Principle

**Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible.** When something fails, users blame themselves — but the fault is almost always in the design. Great design bridges the gap between what people want to do and what the product allows: it is discoverable (you can figure out what to do) and understandable (you can figure out what happened).

## Scoring

**Goal: 10/10.** Score 2 points per satisfied row of the Quick Diagnostic (5 rows = discoverability, evaluation, error recovery, mapping, constraints). Bands: **9-10** = users act without instructions, understand every outcome, and recover from any error; **5-6** = one gulf or error path is broken; **<=3** = users must consult a manual or routinely blame themselves. Report the current score and the diagnostic rows failing it.

## The Two Gulfs