Putting User-Centricity Into Practice: How to Define Product Experience Principles and Level Up Your UX Maturity

Are you struggling to put your users first while designing products? Does your team have conflicting ideas about what makes a good product experience? Do you find it challenging to prioritize feedback about your product or to create consistency across multiple products or features in your organization?

If you’re experiencing any of these situations, you’re not alone. Designing a great user experience can be challenging, especially when team members have different priorities or ideas about what makes a good product. At Alcumus, we recently defined our own Product Experience Principles to guide our product development process and ensure we always put the user first.

What Are Product Experience Principles?

Product Experience Principles are guidelines that reflect what customers feel and expect from digital experiences. They define what makes a product experience “good.” These principles are typically supported by criteria that help teams assess whether the experiences they’re creating meet the defined expectations for each of these guidelines. At Alcumus, our design team recognized the need for Product Experience Principles to ensure that our product development process always puts the user first. We wanted to create a set of guiding principles to help us deliver products that meet user needs, are intuitive, and provide value to our customers.

In this blog post, I’ll share how we defined our Product Experience Principles and how we’re embedding them into our product development process. I’ll also provide tips on how you can organize workshops to create your own principles.

How Did We Define Our Principles?

Defining our principles was a highly collaborative process involving a series of workshops that started with the design team and expanded to include partners from the product and engineering teams. Our approach involved three main parts:

Part 1: Identify Key Themes

In the first workshop, the design team aligned on why we needed Product Experience Principles and what four to five key themes we should focus on.

1. We aligned the team on Product Experience Principles and why we needed them.
2. We gathered examples of Product Experience Principles from other organizations to help people understand what we wanted to achieve.
3. We listed any insights we had from research about what is vital to our customers when interacting with our products.
4. We grouped our insights into themes and reviewed our internal values, mission, and vision to align our principles with them.

Part 2: Draft Your Principles

In the second part, the design team brainstormed ideas for taglines and descriptions of the principles. I took these away and created a first draft of the principles.

1. We mind-mapped answers to “As a user, I should…” and “Our product should be…” for each key theme.
2. We dot-voted on our favourite responses.
3. I wrote the first draft of our principles based on the top-voted answers.
4. I gathered feedback on the principles and iterated on them until we were happy with the results (oh so many iterations).

When drafting your principles, you’ll want to keep the following things in mind:

• Ensure the names or taglines you choose are short and easy to remember. You want your team to be able to recall these principles easily and often.
• The principles should be easy to understand and interpret. You want them to be accessible to everyone crafting the product experience, not just the design team.
• Avoid using buzzwords or jargon. This can make the principles confusing and difficult to apply.
• Be specific and actionable. Each principle should be clear and specific enough to guide decision-making. Vague or general principles can be challenging to apply in practice.

Part 3: Define the Criteria

Your criteria provide actionable steps for your organization to apply the principles to their work. We involved members from each team — product owners, engineers, QA, and designers — in defining the criteria to ensure widespread adoption. Here’s how we did it collaboratively:

1. We built context by defining what we each believed the principle taglines meant in relation to our roles. We then compared these to see how they aligned with our drafts of the principles.
2. We brainstormed actions or behaviours that align with each principle. I asked each participant to include actions specific to their roles.
3. We grouped similar ideas and voted on the ones we felt were the most important.
4. I wrote the final criteria by compiling the ideas with the most votes.

These tips helped guide us in writing the criteria:

• Be concise and actionable. Use strong verbs to create criteria that are actionable and easy to understand.
• Be specific and concrete. Use specific actions and behaviours that are easy to understand and implement. Avoid vague language or abstract concepts.
• Be realistic. Make sure the criteria are achievable given the resources and constraints of the organization. Avoid setting goals that are too ambitious or unrealistic.
• Be impactful. Focus on criteria that will have the most significant impact on the user experience. Prioritize the criteria that will make the biggest difference to your users.
• Be inclusive. Write the criteria so that they can apply to any role. Avoid using jargon or language specific to one department or team. Ensure that the criteria are accessible to everyone involved in the product development process.

Once we completed all three steps, we were ready to start sharing them within Alcumus so that we could start putting them into practice. Turning them into posters is a great way to help teammates learn and remember the principles. Our Marketing designers helped us out and created these beautifully branded posters:

Our product experience principle posters, created by David Park and Tom Sutherland in our Marketing Team.

How Can We Embed These Principles Into Our Process?

So, you’ve defined your Product Experience Principles and plastered them on your office walls. You can check this item off your list and expect everyone to remember the principles, right? I’m afraid it’s not that easy.

To truly embed Product Experience Principles into our process, we need to go beyond just putting them on display. We need to integrate them into every aspect of our product development, from ideation to implementation. Here are some ideas I have for ways that we can do that:

• Incorporate Product Experience Principles into our definition of done, evaluating every design deliverable against them to ensure alignment with our expectations.
• Share the principles during All Hands presentations, reminding everyone of their importance and possibly quizzing them periodically.
• Include the principles in our design critique templates and use them as a reference during critiques to encourage their consideration.
• Add the principles to our Design System documentation website, making them easily accessible for designers and developers.
• Include the principles in our onboarding program, helping new hires understand our values and how they apply to our process.
• Implement a recognition program using kudos cards for team members who apply the Product Experience Principles in their work, providing positive reinforcement for others to follow.

By incorporating these tactics, we can ensure that our Product Experience Principles are not just a set of words on a wall but a guiding force for every aspect of our product development process.

Wrap-Up

Product Experience Principles can help your team establish a common language around product experience and align on what constitutes an outstanding user experience for your customers.

To ensure their effectiveness, it’s best to define Product Experience Principles collaboratively. These principles should be clear, actionable, and easy to remember and should be accompanied by criteria that guide team members across Product, Design, and Engineering to apply the principles throughout the product development process.

By embedding your principles into your product development process, you can increase your organization’s design maturity and empower everyone involved to make user-centric decisions.

We’d love to hear about how you’ve implemented Product Experience Principles within your organization. Let’s keep the conversation going in the comments below. We look forward to hearing your thoughts and experiences!