Creating our design team’s compass
And why your team should get your own
How it started
I was the 6th employee and the first designer at 7shifts. Working as a solo designer on a product you start collecting your own principles that guide you through the design process. I remember my first unofficial principle was “Consistency over innovation”.
As the team grows, inevitably each designer starts collecting their own principles. Your personal principles may get challenged. Maybe sometimes its OK to break convention (consistency) if it means we’re providing a better experience (innovation). Disagreements are inevitable. Your growing design team is now forming their own set of unofficial principles!
Questions start arising like “How do we define quality as a team?”, “What things do we prioritize for decision making?”, “How do we function as a team?”. Questions like these can take up so much of a team’s time since you’re constantly debating your subjective views on how effective design should be done.
Here’s where the compass analogy comes in
Think of principles like a compass; they guide your team through the design process efficiently by systemizing decision making (those three words together = 😍).
Here are some other benefits of using principles on your team:
They prescribe how to live your org’s values
Let’s say your company values that every experience needs to be an 11, that is subjective in its execution. By setting principles, you align your team on a set of objective guidelines to achieve success in your company.
They resolve disagreements
Principles resolve disagreements with your peers as well as stakeholders. By having principles, we can simply ask, “Does this align with our principles?” when a situation arises. It takes the subjectivity out of the equation.
They make your team better and faster
By laying out a set of principles, you create a system of decisions that have already been agreed upon so your team can focus on more important matters…like, how the app/product should work!
They educate
Finally, sharing out principles openly in the organization lets the organization know that your design team has an established standard of what good design means. The bonus here is that it also gives your team more credibility since you’ve got some reasoning behind your decision making.
How we created our principles
I’ll start by saying that there’s not a “one size fits all” process for creating principles. We approached this project much like any other design project; we defined the problem, set some goals, gathered as many ideas as possible and widdled them down to a final deliverable. Here’s how we got it done:
We set some goals
Setting goals for the principles kind of ended up as an ongoing process. There were some initial goals — like ensuring they were concise, memorable and generic enough to apply to any part of design — but we also started thinking about other goals like, “What if we could make each principle not only apply to our craft but also how we work and uphold ourselves within the organization?” and “We should make them conversational so that people can bring them up when talking about design easier!”. We’d use these as goals to measure our success along the way.
We came up with as many ideas as possible
Since the designers are using the principles, it only made sense that they were created bottom up (by the designers) rather than top down (by management). I first ran a workshop with the design team to get out in the open some of the big important things we think about when designing.
We narrowed them down
From there we did an affinity map exercise to narrow down to a set of themes we all wanted our principles to encapsulate.
We carefully crafted five loose phrases that summed up all of their respective themes.
We shared them
We first determined a roll out strategy for the principles. The first deliverable was a set of printed posters to post in a prominent place in the office. We chose a space that is both a designer focused area (where we have a lot of designer events, brainstorm, etc) but also gets a lot of traffic from other people in the company. We also placed them in our wiki and our design system so they can be referenced at any point virtually.
To get designers using them frequently, our design managers continually bring them up when discussing the effectiveness of design.
Mission success
The team has taken total ownership over the principles and they are referenced on almost a daily basis. Huge thanks to the wonderful design team at 7shifts. This was very much a collaborative effort.
Here’s what we ended up with:
Remove unnecessary
Always pare down to the smallest change while dreaming of the big picture.
Design in the open
Invite continuous feedback to ensure ideals fail fast when it’s cheap and easy to pivot.
Deliver with delight
Build trust by following through and delivering great experiences.
Wait, but why?
Dig into the core “why” behind all information presented. Create solutions with empathy.
Who is this for?
Practice inclusion by understanding people’s needs and adapting to changing demands.
Questions?
If you have any questions about this article, how you can apply this process to your organization, or just want to nerd out on design ops, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn.
