We support a large ecosystem where many people play different roles.  They rely the capabilities we provide to do their jobs. We recognize that our users have goals they need to focus on and tasks they need to accomplish.  This is what drives our primary principles.

## Minimize Mechanisms

Our intent is not to create the perfect experience for each use case we have, but to create an experience that is good enough for a number of use cases.  This minimizes the number of user interface patterns that users have to learn and streamlines the overall user experience.  This is especially important given the number of features our enterprise supports.

Our approach to creating a design system has been inspired by the following architectural principle.  

<i>The best way to implement a given function varies case by case, but a beautiful architecture will not strive for “the best.” ...Beautiful architectures employ a minimal set of mechanisms that satisfy the requirements of the whole. Finding “the best” in each case leads to proliferation of error-prone mechanisms, whereas adding mechanisms parsimoniously leads to smaller, faster, and more robust systems.</i><sup>1</sup>


## Design for Everyone

Our award eco-system has millions of users with diverse roles and needs. We have, therefore, designed the SAM.gov design system recognizing that people will use it in ways that we haven't anticipated or explored.

This doesn't mean that we never consider specific users. We have designed some experiences in our eco-system around specific edge-case users.  For example, we designed our role management capabilities considering, in particular, the needs of people who manage the largest organizations. However, given the size and scope of our customers and stakeholders, we approach design with the understanding that we must consider "everyone."  In practice this means, for example, sometimes providing different ways to accomplish the same thing.

## U.S. Web Design System Principles

We additionally support the [U.S. Web Design System Principles](https://designsystem.digital.gov/design-principles/).

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<sup>1</sup> Spinellis, Diomidis. <i>Beautiful Architecture: Leading Thinkers Reveal the Hidden Beauty in Software Design</i>. O'Reilly Media. Kindle Edition.