Cognition & Learnability

Plugin cognition-and-learnability-principles from marketplace universal-design-principles in Deibler/universal-design-principles. Commands read from the repo's manifest — 1 month ago.

Skills (33)

• 80-20-feature-prioritization

  Use this skill when scoping a roadmap, prioritizing features, planning an MVP, or deciding what to ship and what to defer. Trigger when the user asks "what should we build next?", "is this feature worth it?", "should we ship feature X?", or when reviewing a feature backlog. Sub-aspect of `80-20-rule

• 80-20-redesign-targeting

  Use this skill when scoping a redesign or refactor — choosing which existing surfaces deserve full attention and which can be left mostly alone. Trigger when the user asks "where should we focus our redesign?", "do we need to redo all of this?", or when planning incremental design improvements with

• 80-20-rule

  Use this skill whenever the design has many features, controls, or content elements and decisions about which to prioritize matter — feature roadmaps, redesign scoping, IA decisions, dashboard design, settings page audits, marketing content prioritization, or any design with many candidates competin

• chunking-form-grouping

  Use this skill when designing or fixing long forms that ask the user for many fields — sign-up flows, profile setup, settings panels, checkout, intake forms, applications. Trigger when forms exceed ~6 fields, when users complain forms are "too long," when seeing high mid-form drop-off, or when picki

• chunking-numeric-and-otp

  Use this skill when designing inputs or displays for numeric strings — phone numbers, OTP / verification codes, credit card numbers, account IDs, license keys, currency, dates, social security numbers. Trigger when picking a format for displaying numbers, designing OTP entry UIs, or formatting ident

• chunking

  Use this skill whenever the user must hold a sequence of items in working memory — phone numbers, OTP codes, account IDs, address strings, multi-step instructions, long forms, navigation menus with many items. Trigger when designing OTP / verification UIs, formatting numeric strings, breaking long f

• cognition-router

  Use this skill whenever a design task involves cognition, mental models, learnability, complexity reduction, defaults, memory, scanning, or comprehension — regardless of framework or platform. Trigger when the user is designing forms, settings, onboarding, dashboards with many widgets, complex table

• consistency-external

  Apply external consistency — honoring conventions from outside your product (platform conventions, category conventions, established interaction patterns) so users can transfer their learning into your product. Use when designing for a specific platform (iOS, Android, web), entering an established p

• consistency-internal

  Apply internal consistency — making your product coherent with itself across all surfaces, components, and flows. Use when designing or auditing component libraries, defining design tokens, settling cross-team naming conventions, planning a design-system rollout, integrating acquired or legacy code,

• consistency

  Apply the principle of Consistency — making similar things look and behave similarly so users can transfer learning across the interface. Use when designing component libraries, defining naming conventions, choosing whether to invent or borrow patterns, auditing across surfaces (web, mobile, email,

• hicks-law-defaults

  Use this skill when the question is what to *pre-select* in a list of options — radio groups, dropdowns, configuration UIs, plan pickers, sign-up flows, settings. A strong default is the highest-leverage Hick''s Law mitigation: most users accept the default, paying almost no decision cost. Trigger w

• hicks-law-menus

  Use this skill when designing menus, dropdowns, navigation, command palettes, or any interface where the user picks from a list. Trigger when the menu has more than ~7 items, when navigation feels overwhelming, when designing a cmd-K palette, when picking what goes in a "More" overflow, or when argu

• hicks-law-pricing

  Use this skill when designing pricing tables, plan pickers, tier selectors, or any conversion surface where the choice itself is the conversion event. Trigger when laying out 3-tier or 4-tier pricing, when arguing about whether to add a fourth plan, when designing the "Choose your plan" step of onbo

• hicks-law

  Use this skill whenever a design has many options the user must choose among — menus, navigation, pickers, plan tiers, settings panels, action toolbars, lists of templates, anything that asks "which one?" Trigger when the user is laying out a navigation menu, designing a settings page, picking the s

• iconic-arbitrary-and-symbolic

  Apply arbitrary and symbolic icon design — using forms with no inherent meaning that depend on convention to communicate (the hamburger menu, the kebab menu, the AI sparkle, app brand-mark icons). Use when a function has no clear visual referent, when working within a domain that has its own icon vo

• iconic-representation

  Apply iconic representation — using simplified visual symbols to communicate function, status, or category at a glance. Use when designing icon sets, choosing between icon and text labels, evaluating whether to lean on existing iconography (resemblance to a known object) or invent symbolic icons (ar

• iconic-resemblance

  Apply iconic resemblance — designing or choosing icons that visually look like what they represent. Use when picking icons for actions or objects with strong visual referents (camera, clock, lock, calendar), evaluating whether a custom icon is communicating, or testing whether your icon set actually

• mental-model-mismatch-and-onboarding

  Use this skill when designing onboarding, when diagnosing why users keep getting confused, when migrating users from one product convention to another, or when the system genuinely differs from familiar comparable products. Trigger when the user mentions "users don''t get it," "we keep getting the s

• mental-model-system-vs-interaction

  Use this skill when distinguishing the two mental-model types — system models (how the user thinks the system works) and interaction models (how the user thinks they should use it). Trigger when designing onboarding (which model to teach), reviewing user confusion (which model is wrong), or building

• mental-model

  Use this skill whenever the design will be used by people who bring prior expectations — which is essentially every design. Trigger when designing onboarding, when picking metaphors (folders, channels, projects), when reviewing why users keep getting confused, when migrating from one product convent

• mimicry-behavioral

  Apply behavioral mimicry — making an interface element behave like a familiar physical object so the user''s physical-world intuitions transfer to the digital interaction. Use when designing gestures, animations, transitions, drag-and-drop, scroll behaviors, or any interaction where physical-world a

• mimicry-surface

  Apply surface mimicry — making an interface element look like a familiar physical object to communicate its purpose at a glance. Use when introducing a control or container that has no native UI vocabulary, designing a niche product that benefits from a recognizable visual reference (a journal that

• mimicry

  Apply the principle of Mimicry — borrowing the form, behavior, or visual language of something familiar to make a new design recognizable. Use when introducing a novel feature whose function would be opaque without an analogy, choosing between metaphor and convention, designing for a category your u

• progressive-disclosure-defaults-and-tucking

  Use this skill when deciding *what to surface* and *what to tuck* — the editorial choices behind progressive disclosure. Trigger when laying out a settings page, picking which form fields to show by default, deciding whether a section starts collapsed or open, or arguing about whether a feature dese

• progressive-disclosure-disclosure-affordances

  Use this skill when picking the *mechanism* for revealing tucked content — accordion vs. modal vs. tab vs. separate page vs. tooltip. Trigger when designing the UI for "More options," picking between an inline accordion and a side sheet, deciding whether a wizard step should be a modal or a separate

• progressive-disclosure

  Use this skill whenever a design has *more* available than the user needs to see at this moment — settings panels with advanced options, forms with optional fields, dashboards with drill-down detail, navigation with deep IA, dialogs with "More options" affordances, marketing pages with FAQ accordion

• recognition-over-recall

  Use this skill whenever the user must locate or choose something from many possibilities — pickers, command palettes, navigation menus, autocompletes, recents lists, search results, settings panels. Trigger when designing inputs that ask the user to "type the right thing," when picking between dropd

• recognition-pickers-and-palettes

  Use this skill when designing pickers, dropdowns, comboboxes, autocompletes, command palettes, or any UI that lets the user select from a known set. Trigger when picking between a free-text field and a select; when designing a command palette; when reviewing why users keep typing wrong values into a

• recognition-recents-and-suggestions

  Use this skill when designing surfaces that accelerate repeat tasks through recents, frequently-used items, and contextual suggestions. Trigger when designing pickers used repeatedly, command palettes, navigation that should adapt to user behavior, or any surface where a returning user shouldn''t ha

• wayfinding-breadcrumbs-and-context

  Use this skill when designing the orientation chrome that tells users where they are — breadcrumbs, current-page indicators, page titles, header context, "you are here" markers, parent-link affordances. Trigger when designing a multi-level IA, when users complain "I lost track of where I was," when

• wayfinding-physical-spatial-metaphors

  Use this skill when deciding whether (and how) to borrow physical-world wayfinding metaphors for software — rooms, doors, paths, maps, landmarks. Trigger when designing app shells with multiple "spaces," when picking metaphors for navigation (workspace, channel, board, project), when reviewing skeuo

• wayfinding-search-and-recovery

  Use this skill when designing search as the universal wayfinding recovery, or when designing for users who got lost — 404 pages, "results not found," "you''ve reached an unexpected page," empty states that should orient, and any moment where the user''s mental map has failed and the system must repa

• wayfinding

  Use this skill whenever a user must navigate within a non-trivial space — a multi-page web app, a documentation site, a hierarchical settings panel, a conference site, a multi-step flow, a campus, a building, an app with deep IA. Trigger when the user asks how navigation should be structured, when u

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