Experience has shown me that when I design from a place of love, it fosters a beautiful result that users love in turn - like a mirror effect. Over the course of a career it's easy to lose love and burn out. So, you'll have to fight to find and hold onto the love in your work sometimes. If you do manage to find it, the beautiful designs you'll create will bring others happiness. When something is well designed it conveys professionalism, makes users in turn fall in love and journey further creating a lasting positive impression. I'm at my best when I'm designing from that place and trying to help others get back there.

Usability should probably be number one, but I'm a romantic. The key to creating a successful product design is to ensure your product is useful, period. If your product addresses your customer's needs, your business will thrive, enhance satisfaction, differentiate services, attract and retain users, and lay foundation for growth and sustainability. Understand your target audience, design with clear goals that prioritize usability and you will build products that truly, positively, impact your user's lives.

Keep it simple. Simplicity means to keep things easy and as user-friendly as possible, eliminating complexity. Simple design supports a user's evolving needs, making it easier for them to find value in the product. This principle really applies to almost any piece of design from a logo to a complex Saas dashboard layout and everything in between.

The true measure of success is based on how many times you can bounce back from failure. I embrace failing fast as part of my overall design process. It involves swiftly acknowledging and learning from mistakes, allowing for rapid pivots in design direction. Failing fast values the immediacy of insights gained through failures, fostering agility and adaptability. Much like living in the moment encourages a richer experience of life, failing fast in design enables quicker course corrections, leading to the most effective and innovative results. It emphasizes the importance of continuous learning, rapid iteration, and the resilience needed to navigate the landscape of product design. Failing is learning.

Design system consistency extends your brand identity across various platforms with a unified and recognizable presence that builds trust. Consistent experiences cultivate an emotional bond making users feel intimately connected to products. The value of design systems is well recognized now within the product design discipline, however it seems that its value is still often called into question. Avoid working with companies who don't value design.