19 NNGroup UX Principles / Golden Slogans (You Are Not the User / Keep It Simple / Less Is More / Why Beats What / It Depends … Clustered into 5 Major Themes + Core Mindsets/Counterexamples)
The essence of 19 Nielsen Norman Group UX Slogans, which compress decades of accumulated usability common sense into pithy lines you can stick at your workstation. They are clustered into 5 major themes: ① Don’t treat yourself as the user — You Are Not the User / Design for Them, Not for You / UX Is People / Users Aren't Lazy, They're Efficient. ② Less is more (restraint) — Keep It Simple (guard against Featuritis) / Less Is More (focus on core tasks and set a value threshold) / More Choices, More Trouble (choice overload) / Make It Easy (proactively iterate rather than passively exercise restraint, contrasting the “keep” vs “make” in Keep It Simple). ③ Communication is design — Communication, Not Decoration / You Can't Impose Joy (counterexamples: splash screens/animations) / Brevity is Brilliance (cut web copy in half) / This Is Too Easy to Understand, Said No One Ever (even experts prefer clarity) / Clarify, Don't Mystify (Information Scent · anti-clickbait). ④ Understand the problem first — Why Beats What (use Think-Aloud to find root causes) / Stop Solutioneering (list unknowns first, then do research). ⑤ Replace guesswork with evidence — If You're Not Checking, You're Guessing (100% vs 25% empirical evidence from forums) / Show Me the Data (quantitative A/B testing + qualitative interviews) / UX Researchers, We Like to Watch (behavior outperforms self-report · Margaret Mead/Descartes) / It Depends (the spectrum between best practices and context). Target readers = product managers; jargon is explained inline; each cluster comes with a Why explanation + counterexamples.