Crafting Your Own Design Principles #DesignGoals

Anthony Nguyen
Aug 8, 2017 · 4 min read

Defining your own design principles can be a fun and rewarding process. Not only does having principles keep you and your team anchored to your core beliefs of what success looks like, but it also leads to better design decisions. The design of anything requires a lot of decision making and while some decisions may be easy, having more decisions can often lead to less clarity between one option and the next. These design principles will act as your guiding light if you ever lose sight of the main path.

Another reason for having design principles is to make sure you are tackling the right problems. No two companies are the same, and every company faces their own challenges. You’d be surprised at how often designers take on the wrong issues; it’s costly both in time and effort.

So what are design principles anyway?

Design principles help create a consistent experience for your users, and higher-level principles help guide your decisions as you’re working on a project. As designprinciplesFTW.com describes, there are actually two kinds of design principles. Universal and specific.

Universal design principles are also called heuristic, which applies to basic human behaviors And can be used for all kinds of designs

“The 10 most general principles for interaction design. They are called ‘heuristics’ because they are more in the nature of rules of thumb than specific usability guidelines.” — Jakob Nielsen, Usability Guru

Specific design principles are ones that you create to maintain a consistent design across projects. You can think of a style guide as a set of specific design principles that you craft your UI With. But for this article we will be focusing on universal design principles.

Steps to developing your own design principles

Discuss and define why it matters

Sit down with your team and talk about what are the core functions for having design principles and why they are important. Also think about what success looks like within your company and align your principles with them. It’s important to gather the voices of team members from a variety of functions, so that you don’t miss any valuable insight that you wouldn’t otherwise be aware of.

Group brainstorm exercise

Based on my own team’s discussions, we came up with some core areas to measure success around. These are some of the high-level problems that we want defined:

  • How will our end users look at us?
  • How will our customers look at us?
  • How will we look at ourselves?
Defining your problem to build your principles around

With these problem areas defined, the fun part begins with the next exercise. You’ll have everyone write down as many possible ideas and phrases to address the problems. The key here is to be as creative as possible, and come up with a master list without thinking too hard about it. Spend about 5–7 minutes on this exercise, and have everyone write their ideas down on a post-it note, and put it all on one board.

Crowdsourcing principle ideas

Next part of this exercise is to narrow down your results by having each person place stickers on their favorite answers. Spend about 3 minutes and allow each person to have only a few stickers (maybe 3–4 stickers each, depending on your group size), so that you really think about what’s important and matters most.

Narrowing down and voting for your favorite ideas

You’ll start to notice, there will be some overlap on some ideas, and patterns will start to emerge as to what your team truly values. It’s quite interesting to see what ideas are getting the most alignment on.

Now after you’ve gone through this process, go through them again on your other problem statements to gather more ideas. It’s a tedious process, but allows for thoroughness and alignment amongst your team.

Wrapping it up

Once you’ve done your group brainstorming and voting for all of your problem areas, it’s easy to see where things will go from here. You’ve got all of your problems answered, and narrowed down all the strongest ideas with the most votes. Constructing your design principals list with them will now be much easier. With this new list, you can decide to either refine them further, or release this core list to a wider set of people within your company, for further narrowing down of ideas.

Hopefully this simple but effective exercise helps you on your journey to defining your own design principles within your company.

Anthony Nguyen

Written by

UX Designer. Typography fanatic. I help build products for people…

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