Apply when product, UX, or feature-scope tradeoffs come up. Choose user delight over implementation convenience; ship fewer polished features over more rough ones.
Collected from public GitHub. Every version is saved exactly as it was and never changes. Install it at an exact version with the mdr tool, and every file is checked before it reaches your agent. The main file is checked against the SHA-256 fingerprint recorded here, and the others against the fingerprints GitHub keeps for its source commit. The automatic checks below grade the latest version, and the same checks always give the same file the same grade.
What the file says
# Experience First
When implementation convenience conflicts with user delight, choose delight.
- Every feature, control, and option must be justified
- Ship less, ship better (polished experience with three features beats rough one with ten)
- Prototype before committing (design decisions are cheaper in throwaway HTML than production code)
- Get the details right (transitions, alignment, spacing, feedback, error states)
- Tighten the core loop (every feature should serve the central workflow or get 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 *sequence* of work. This principle governs the *target*.
The line at the top of this page pins the label git:20260923.4a3ef20, which is what most people want. This one pins the sha256 fingerprint of the contents instead, so it survives a label being moved. Either way the exact version is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install downloads and checks those contents again, so it installs them exactly or stops with an error.
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_omj6h2il6ub2pwyk
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=michael-denyer/pstack-claude/principle-experience-first
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/688917387e19da6a343fe657c726eb65998937da69ed7d29f1dfaadb53516a10
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