Design principles

These are emerging from the ongoing process of designing and building JS Bin. They’re a work in progress.

• Visitors to jsbin.com get a cursor Nothing obscures the tool – start typing to begin a bin.
• Support learning
• Streaming by default
• Anonymous first Avoid requiring login.
• Open first Design and development happens in public, unless there’s a good reason to go private.
• Respect ex-users Don’t break links to their stuff. Never make public something which a user has set as private.
• Return is as it was left When people return to an application or document, they expect it to be as they left it. FIXME this principle is currently ambiguous when it comes to the document affecting the application state. Where possible, implement this principle.
• Assert failure to communicate, not the lack of a network An app can’t truly know that there’s no network, and people care more about the risk of data loss than the status of their network. This principle came from a discussion in offlinefirst.
• Get users close to the code While using an editor users shouldn’t be distracted by the design of the editor, so it should be as boring and similar in it’s look and feel to the OS as possible.