About principle-experience-first
A design skill for people building user-facing features, libraries, and internal APIs. It prioritizes the experience of everyone who uses or maintains the work, and favors focused, polished functionality over feature count.
Key features
- 01Justify each feature and control
- 02Prototype before implementation
- 03Polish interaction details
- 04Keep features focused on the core workflow
- 05Consider maintainers as users
Use cases
- 01Reviewing a feature proposal
- 02Prototyping interface decisions
- 03Refining transitions and error states
Install
Copy the command and run it in a terminal.
npx skills add https:/After installing, type/principle-experience-firstin Claude Code to confirm it loaded.
Details
From the project READMEExperience First
When implementation convenience conflicts with user delight, choose delight.
- Every feature, control, and option must be justified
- Ship less, ship better (polished experience with three features beats rough one with ten)
- Prototype before committing (design decisions are cheaper in throwaway HTML than production code)
- Get the details right (transitions, alignment, spacing, feedback, error states)
- Tighten the core loop (every feature should serve the central workflow or get out of the way)
The user is whoever consumes the work. For a UI that is the end user. For a library or an internal API it is the colleague who imports it. The engineer who maintains the code next is a user too. Weigh their experience the same way, and explain impact from their perspective.
Foundations should serve the experience. Foundational thinking governs the sequence of work. This principle governs the target.