Forming Design Principles For Your Product
Understanding design principles and creating them with a 2-step, easy-to-use framework with anyone in the team or organization.
Design principles are value statements that describe the most important goals that a product or service should deliver for users and are used to frame design decisions. When working on a new product, it is especially important to establish a few simple design principles in the early stages — preferably, even before you start designing the interface and design system.
With most organizations having a separate marketing and branding team, the responsibility of defining design principles may be something that most product teams won’t think about. However, design principles are more than just a product or brand guideline.
The difference between Branding, Principles of Good Design and Design Principles
They may sound similar at first glance, but there’s a need to address the differences between branding, principles of good design, and design principles.
Branding
Branding is the promise that the brand makes, what the brand stands for, and the personality that the brand conveys to its consumers. Branding is intentionally designed to influence people to feel something specific, and that feeling will influence them to make specific decisions that benefit the brand. For example, when you think about Apple or owning an Apple product — it makes you feel exclusive, expensive, and maybe someone with great taste. That’s what the brand designed to make you feel as a consumer.
Principles of Good Design
This is what you learned in school: Contrast, alignment, repetition, balance, proximity. Usability guidelines and heuristics. They are principles of what makes a design good and are not unique to your product. You, also, shouldn’t have “Make it high contrast” as a design principle for your product.
Design Principles
Design principles are specific to the product or service that is being designed. They are often written as short statements that describe the values and goals of your product or services. They can also be a reflection of the design philosophy, or serve as an inspiration for the team.
For example, Atlassian’s design principle ‘Match purpose and feel familiar’, shows that the design decisions and patterns can have visual and behavioral similarities, but should allow the flexibility of adapting to unique purposes while staying harmonious. This is why Atlassian websites have different layouts and designs, but they still look familiar and Atlassian.
Defining design principles as a product team
Yes, not just within designers, but as a team. There are 2 simple reasons: Alignment and guiding decision-making.
Alignment
When a team defines design principles together, everyone plays in a part in choosing how to achieve the product’s purpose through design. Because the foundational principles were discussed and formed together, everyone on the core team would have clarity from Day 1. This alignment will also help in keeping the cohesiveness of the pattern library.
Guiding decision-making
Having knowledge and understanding of the design principles of a product speeds up decision-making. Although design principles center around design decisions, they can applied in many different parts and stages of product development. Most product decisions can be shaped by it, even indirectly. The design principles also serve as a guide or belief that the team can fall back on when faced with two competing goals.
For example, if one of the design principles for a wearable product team is ‘Make it Glanceable’, the team should not design an interface that is cluttered with UI elements or use font sizes that are too small. If the team believes in ‘Designing with Intent and Empathy’, the Product Owner should consider that when planning features and fencing the team from overly excited board members on ideas that do not benefit the product and users. The design principles ensure consistency in decision-making across teams working on the same product or service.
How to run a Design Principle workshop
Around the end of 2023, I happened to be working with a client team that needed to develop their greenfield product. They wanted to transform their human services into digital services so they could reduce operations costs and manual work. The client team, consisting of business operations, marketing, and CEO, has a strong branding for their human services and needed that to be instilled into their digital services, but have no idea where to start. They do not know branding or design, so I experimented with an easy-to-follow Design Principle workshop. I took inspiration from a Proto-persona workshop, and it worked like magic.
Step 1: Create a Product Persona
Using the framework below, set aside 40–60 mins for this activity. It is highly recommended to run this with the core team members, which means people who work on the product daily.
- Give your participants 10–15 minutes to generate ideas for all the quadrants on post-its. This can be done individually, in pairs, or groups of 4.
- Have each person/group present their ideas. Have a discussion.
- Give your participants dot votes to vote on the quadrants or ideas that they find most relatable to the product.
- Take the high-voted ideas or elements and combine them into 1 piece of Product Persona.
Step 2: Generate Design Principles
Set 60–90 minutes for this activity. Think about some suitable prompts for your participants to help them get started. The prompts should center around user experience, products, and services, such as:
- What words come to mind when you think about the most ideal user experience for the customers?
- What design philosophy would we like to convey through our products and services?
- Give your participants 3–4 prompts.
- Generate as many ideas as possible in 5–10 minutes. They don’t have to be refined. It can be a single word, a phrase, or a sentence.
- Pick the top 2 ideas and present them. If other participants have similar ideas, group them.
- If there are many ideas at the end of the sharing, dot vote for the best 5–6 ideas.
- With the inspirations of the top 5–6 ideas now, try to generate design principles. This can be done individually or as a team.
- Continue to share and refine the principles as a team.
It’s not a one-time-fit-all
In the early stages, trying to articulate shared guidelines can be hard. Design principles are not something that can be measured or quantified, and defining them can take a few iterations. Our key goal for this workshop is to take the first step to uncover how each individual perceives the product and shape the principles from there.
It is unlikely that you will have a refined set of design principles at the end of this workshop (especially if you are doing this for the first time), so designers can continue to refine and nudge on these ideas. The activity serves as a good place to start with a set of aligned understanding with the rest of the team.
This article is also published on my LinkedIn.
