Good design is harmony.

Principals

Disappearance is the goal. The best design erases itself, the user experiences the task, never the tool. Consistency enables habit. Predictable behavior, repeated, becomes embodied. Surprise destroys flow and forces conscious attention back onto the interface. Design from the human inward. Start with how people already think, move, and behave, not with what the technology makes possible. Reduce decisions to zero. Every choice the user must make about the tool is a failure. The ideal interaction requires no deliberation. Complexity is a moral failure. Unnecessary features, modes, and options impose cognitive and physical burdens on the person. Simplicity is an ethical commitment, not just aesthetic preference. The body knows before the mind. Whether through physical affordance or deep consistency, good design routes behavior through habit and intuition rather than conscious reasoning. Observe before you design. Both traditions are empirical, watch what people actually do, not what they say they do or what you imagine they'll do. Refinement over invention. The goal is convergence toward an anonymous, frictionless form, not novelty or self-expression by the designer.

The user's attention is sacred. Never redirect it from the task to the tool. Attention is finite, every demand on it is a cost. Good design feels inevitable. When done right, the user cannot imagine the object or interface being any other way.