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.
npx skills add wondelai/skills --skill design-everyday-things --agent claude-code
Same command for any agent — swap --agent for codex, cursor, copilot.
Weekly change comes from our own snapshots, not the repository page — it measures attention, not adoption.
# 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 Every interaction with a product requires bridg
- Core Principle
- Scoring
- The Two Gulfs
- Gulf of Execution
- Gulf of Evaluation
- Seven Fundamental Design Principles
- 1. Discoverability
- 2. Affordances
- 3. Signifiers
- 4. Mappings
- 5. Constraints
- 6. Feedback
- 7. Conceptual Models
- Human Error
What does the design-everyday-things skill do?
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.
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add wondelai/skills --skill design-everyday-things --agent claude-code` — it drops the skill into your project so the agent can pick it up. Swap the --agent value for codex, cursor or copilot if you use one of those.
Where does this skill come from?
From wondelai/skills, a repository with 1,835 stars. We read it straight from the repository tree rather than a submitted listing, so what you see here is what is actually published.
Is a popular skill a good skill?
Not necessarily. Stars measure attention, not adoption — a repository can trend for a week and be abandoned. That is why we show the weekly change from our own snapshots next to the total, instead of a single flattering number.