Designing User Interfaces

Minimize cognitive load without sacrificing capability, agency, context, or recovery. Apply Apple-derived principles through the target platform's conventions; do not copy platform-specific components or metrics blindly.

Choose the Mode

• Proposal: Recommend the smallest coherent structure and explain material hierarchy, disclosure, accessibility, and tradeoffs.
• Review: Lead with prioritized findings tied to user effort, risk, evidence, or convention.
• Implementation: Inspect the current interface and design system, make the bounded requested change, and verify affected states and interactions.

Identify the primary user, task, context, platform, inputs, constraints, and product conventions from available evidence. Do not invent research, business rules, capabilities, defaults, success claims, or destructive consequences. Preserve behavior, content meaning, data semantics, permissions, persistence, and recovery unless authorized evidence requires a change. Ask one question only when a missing product decision blocks safe work; otherwise leave uncertain behavior unchanged and label the unknown.

Design Principles