As a design moves between product owners, business analysts, product managers and developers, small design decisions and functional specs get lost for many reasons — requirements change, revisions are made and parties aren't always represented correctly. Sometime's a developer is under time constraints and must improvise. This isn't a bad thing, it happens at Rackspace, Google, Facebook and other large companies all the time.

This phenomenon can't and shouldn't be stopped. Instead, I want to educate developers; to teach what is important and how to improvise by learning basic design principles. To some, insignificant details like error message wording or whether an action is triggered with a link or an HTML button isn't important, but it really is — and I want to teach you why.

Follow along via Twitter or RSS over the next few weeks for a new design principle every day. Here's a preview of the first few topics:

• Lesson 1: The 80/20 Rule
• Lesson 2: Aesthetic-Usability Effect
• Lesson 3: Accessibility
• Lesson 4: Affordance
• Lesson 5: Consistency