Principle Experience First

---
name: principle-experience-first
description: "Experience first. Apply when a product, UX or scope trade-off comes up."
license: MIT
metadata:
  source: "pstack principle-experience-first, MIT, Copyright (c) 2026 Lauren Tan, github.com/cursor/plugins, adapted; checked against pstack 0.15.36 at commit 0bb6f37"
---

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# Experience first

When implementation convenience conflicts with the user's delight, choose delight.

- Every feature, control and option has to justify itself.
- Ship less, ship better: a polished experience with three features beats a rough one with ten.
- Prototype before committing; a design decision is cheaper in a throwaway sketch than in production code.
- Get the details right: transitions, alignment, spacing, feedback, error states.
- Tighten the core loop: every feature serves the central workflow or gets out of the way.

The user is whoever consumes the work. For a UI that is the end user. For a library or an internal API it is the colleague who imports it. The engineer who maintains the code next is a user too. Weigh their experience the same way, and explain impact from their perspective.

Foundations should serve the experience: foundational thinking governs the order of the work, this principle governs the target.

**Stop** when a feature cannot be justified from the user's side. Cut it rather than polish it.