User experience, even over developer experience.

Jeremy has some solid thoughts on what makes a good design principle. In brief, it should be a little provocative and not automatically achievable; it needs to be something to actually drives behaviour and guides decision making, rather than being bland, boring, and already achieved. Something like that initial statement, which I agree should be a fairly universal principle. I also agree with his follow up:

Sadly, I think the current state of “modern” web development reverses that principle. Developer efficiency is prized above all else. Like I said, that would be absolutely fine if we’re talking about technologies that only developers are exposed to, but as soon as we’re talking about shipping those technologies over the network to end users, it’s negligent to continue to prioritise the developer experience.