Nov 22, 2017
Design principles and product prioritization
Design principles, onboarding FTW, and what keeps Product Managers up at night.
Hello designers!
We have a big project kicking off here at the moment, and one of the first things we are doing is starting a design system , and creating our design principles.
Why would we do this? To seek alignment early and be able to scale fast without too much design debt. By making these decisions early on, we can focus more on creating a great experience, and less on the look and feel of our components.
I have also included a couple of articles this week that I found really interesting, about onboarding and what keeps Product Managers up at night.
Have a great week,
Mal Sanders
Design principles
I stumbled across this site this week, and is a fantastic list of design principles used by influential people and companies such as Dieter Rams and British Airways.
Why design principles? Like a vision or mission statement, creating your own design principles acts as a way to align what you are doing and reduce ambiguity.
What is more important consistency across all platforms or platform agnostic controls? Accuracy or speed?
Matthew Strom documents a process that the Wall Street Journal has been using. Starting with some base criteria, he then speaks about the “Even Over statement” technique which is also pretty cool.
Check it our here
[Related video] Dieter Rams: Ten principles for good design
- Good design is innovative
- Good design makes a product useful
- Good design is aesthetic
- Good design makes a product understandable
- Good design is unobtrusive
- Good design is honest
- Good design is long-lasting
- Good design is thorough down to the last detail
- Good design is environmentally friendly
- Good design is as little design as possible
The first time matters
Onboarding is something that can make or break a product. Did you know that 86% of mobile users never returned after initial download? Even worse, only 2.7% still use the app after day 30.
User onboarding is critical because of all the marketing $$ to get people to your site, and then building enough trust to get them to download your app, create an account to login, the last thing you want to do is turn them away.
Onboarding is the time to make good on what has been promised
This is the first time they’ll see your product, the first time they’ll experience who you are and everything you stand for. And if what they experience is bare bones and clunky, that’s how they’re going to remember you
Wayne Chang has documented his journey in creating a first time experience at Crashlytics. It is fairly detailed, and is boldly called “The Quintessential Guide For Building An Unforgettable First-time User Experience”. I’m not sure if it is the quintessential guide, but it’s pretty good.
What keeps product managers up at night?
If you are already in product you probably know the answer already, but according to a study from Fresh Tilled Soil, the result is clearly ‘prioritisation’
Or put anther way, knowing what to build next compared to all others is the biggest worry.
Getting the valuable resources you need can feel like horse-trading with the rest of the organization. Suddenly prioritization feels more like politics than business
It’s a lot like project management. Its not that we don’t know what to do, it’s that many of the people we rely on don’t directly report to us.
Richard Banfield outlines some handy strategy on how to best combat this as well, check it out here
