Here’s an assertion for you: The past decade’s most successful technology companies rose to the top because of their understanding and emphasis of core design principles.

I bet, as web technology becomes more and more accessible and easy to deploy, unique user experience (UX) will become the main differentiator between companies who will flourish, and those who will not.

Let’s take Twitter as an example. Twitter is a company built on a simple technology with a purposeful design and UX. Twitter is a basic CRUD application and its core product is limiting text messages to 140 characters. That’s it! Think about it. Twitter is such a straight-forward technology that even a lot of beginner’s tutorials teach you basic Rails by helping you make a Twitter-clone.

Twitter makes use of one of my favorite design principles: Constraint. Constraint is a method of limiting the actions that can be performed on a system. You’d like to post an update for the world to see? No problem, but you’ve got to do it in 140 characters or less. The whole construct of their product is set up to facilitate this task. Everyone can do it, and that’s the real power of constraint.

Notice, how there’s absolutely no technological constrain in a 140 characters. Text and numbers are the lightest forms of bits we can send around the internet, so why on earth would you constrain that? Facing a big, white, blank input field can be intimidating. Setting up a blog can be daunting and overkill. And emailing is clumsy and not built to be social. By constraining what you can write in a single tweet, it suddenly becomes much easier to just do it. Mimicking the format of SMS texting and removing practically all options, the psychological bar for entry has been lowered significantly. If you can text, you can tweet. Making the technology help us chop up our communication in little chunks, Twitter also allowed for a myriad of communicational possibilities – from status updates to news feeds, from smart mobs to sentiment analysis.

“But I can build all kinds of cool features into my product. Why would I ever constrain my coding wizardry?” I hear you say. Don’t let the lure of shining new technology blind you. Is the purpose of your product to implement a wicked fast node.js server or is it to solve an actual problem for people? (The answer should be obvious.) Technology, like design, is always a means to an end. Working rigorously with user-centric design helps you focus on that purpose. Keep it simple and understand what works. Mark Zuckerberg said it himself:

Looking back, the first version of Facebook was very simple. There were almost no features. There were no status updates, photo albums or messages. There was no News Feed or Platform. The only people who could use it were college students in the United States.

Hence, the collection of functions and programs you see on Facebook today wasn’t the magic formula which set it apart from the competition. Instead it was its exclusive network and user-centric interface.

Design is important for this very reason. It helps highlight the human side of the problem technology is meant to solve. The late Steve Jobs and preacher of insanely great design once said, “Technology alone is not enough”. It is indeed a keen observation.

(Further reading: Universal Principles of Design.)