Design Principles in Practice
By Ryan Merrill, 84.51° Experience Designer
Establishing a set of design principles is paramount to the success of a design system. The myriad questions and decisions that could stifle a system’s potential become easier to answer when the team is equipped with a strong set of principles.
Principles shore up a team’s confidence when faced with difficult design decisions. A design principle of “Make it Clear” vs. “Make it Comprehensive” may result in a user interface that has more white space and brighter colors.
Andrew Couldwell writes in his book Laying the Foundations:
“Your brand, design, and engineering principles are the mantra that guide everything you do. They are the driving force and inspiration. With every foundation, component, pattern, template, web page, or banner you design, and with each header and paragraph you write, ask yourself: “Does this align to our brand principles?”
Design principles can help smooth over contentious disagreements in design critiques. A strong set of principles can put an end to debates much better than any mood or opinion ever could.
And as teams tackle increasingly difficult problems from their users, clients, and stakeholders, these same principles can justify why a team prioritized certain features over others.
Design and product principles should be carefully considered, opinionated and nuanced.
Don’t rush creating your principles. If your products have survived this long without them, it’s worth taking a slow and considered approach when writing them. They should be opinionated and nuanced.
A principle such as “simple” or “easy to understand” doesn’t say much. All products strive to be easy to understand. However a principle such as Shopify’s “Empowering” is unique and tangible:
“We want people to feel like they can accomplish whatever they’re trying to do. Our experiences should give people confidence that they’re capable of achieving their goals, no matter their level of experience.”
Despite their name, the initial draft of design or product principles should include a cross section of disciplines across an organization. Principles written in a vacuum and communicated from a design team’s ivory tower are likely to be met with disdain.
Cross-discipline collaboration creates an environment where participants share experiences that others may have been ignorant of. And by creating the principles together, everyone has a vested interest in their success.
Creating the Principles
The following is adapted from a wonderful 2012 UX Magazine article by Alan Colville about establishing a product vision, but can also be applied to creating a set of principles.
Invite a representative group of Engineers, Designers, Product Managers, and stakeholders to a workshop to produce a rough draft of principles.
Separate the participants into cross-disciplinary groups of 3–5 people. A quick warmup exercise helps get everyone’s brains engaged and focused on the task.
Persona Creation
The UX designers in an organization should have a solid baseline of a product’s user needs through their research work. They’ll likely have a set of personas, but as part of this exercise it’s important the team works together to create new personas. This helps by getting everyone as familiar as possible with their persona.
Once all teams have finished creating a persona, designate someone from each team to explain it to the others. Teams should aim for a familiarity with their personas akin to a close friend or family member.
Value Definitions
Once all teams have shared their personas, it’s time to define the values each persona receives from a product. Encourage participants to imagine themselves as a persona and to list the qualities and feelings that matter to them when using your product.
Weed out system quality properties such as responsive, direct, quick, accessible, secure, reliable, and safe. Again, we all want our products to be quick and accessible. Aim for words such as robust, connected, tailored, community, or personal.
Group common values together and label each group with a one-to-three word label that summarizes each. Then have each member of the group vote on their three most important values.
Value Statements
Once everyone has finished voting, select the top 3–4 values and turn these into sentences. This helps explain the meaning of the each value, which is easy to get lost with a single word. A value such as “familiar” could turn into “Familiar enough to understand and use right away.”
Once everyone has shared their sentences, the system team should take the raw material and distill it into a set of design and product principles.
Communicating Principles
Having a set of principles is great, but failing to regularly communicate them results in a little more than a set of fancy words.
In Expressive Design Systems, Yesenia Perez-Cruz makes a case for using design principles as a tool:
“Put your principles into practice by coming up with tools that make it easier to apply them. For example, you could create a design review template that has the principles baked in, or scorecards for teams to measure themselves against the principles in project retrospectives.”
Those working on the design system team will be intimately familiar with these principles. But this familiarity shouldn’t let them get complacent of the need to consistently communicate these principles.
The systems team should act as stewards and continue to monitor and adjust an organization’s principles as their products evolve.
A harmonious and adopted set of principles prevents a product experience from becoming bifurcated and inconsistent. These principles, applied consistently and with care, can shape a suite of products into a cohesive family.
In full transparency and communication, here is a first draft of the design and product principles at 84.51°.
Scale into Complexity
Our data is complex, but it doesn’t mean our users’ experience has to be. Users should be able to understand our products’ content at a glance while empowering them to dive deep into the data to extract insights. When designing an interaction, err on the side of simplicity and add complex interactions when necessary.
Trustworthy
Our products should engender a sense of trust with our users by providing direct and actionable feedback when performing actions, especially when there is an error. They should promote a sense of safety within our applications and give users clear instructions when performing important actions and make it easy to recover if things go wrong.
Consistent
Users should feel powerful and comfortable using our products, whether they are novices or experts. Our products should be part of a cohesive system that is working to help users achieve their goals.
