Defining Qlik’s (design) principles

When it comes to design principles, deciding on what they are is only one part of the challenge. How you frame them for the various audiences and get them embedded into everyday decisions is just as important. A lot of that depends on how they fit with your other design artefacts and how the design team works with other parts of the organisation. Our goal for Qlik’s Product Design Principles is to help connect the design decisions to the overall vision by essentially describing how we (at Qlik) approach designing our products. To essentially define the values and activities that matter most to us and that we believe create great products. So that through them we can enable teams to make confident (and often autonomous) decisions, whilst ensuring that how we go about the implementation of those decisions reflects a shared ethos and approach.
But we didn’t get to this overnight.

When it comes to defining and articulating our design principles, we in the product design team have been through a number of iterations. During this journey we discovered that there are several levels that design principles can communicate at. When we first set off (back when Qlik Sense was still a mere twinkle in our collective eye) we were keen to avoid the lofty and purely aspirational principles that, as Jared Spool puts it “[do not] help designers learn more about their design [or] make critical decisions about what they’re building”. We were a small team with a big challenge and we needed tools that helped ground and consolidate our ideas. As such our first set of 7 design principles were focussed on assisting the designers and product managers in solving the challenges that came with designing a new version of an existing product. Each described a characteristic of what we wanted the new experience to be and were supplemented by some simple guiding statements. Here’s an example of one of them:

Natural — Reflect people’s natural understanding of what they are doing and what they need to do next.

• Use progressive disclosure to surface the advanced options as needed.
• Match tools to contexts.
• Group by context and task as well as similarity.
• Support actions taken over different timeframes.

We were pretty happy with these at first. But as the team, product and the organisation grew, we found that these didn’t scale well as they focussed too much on the thing not the activity, which meant they didn’t help communicate the overall vision. We tried to address this by introducing what (at the time) we called ‘philosophies’. These were 4 values that could be held in mind whenever you started thinking about a new design challenge, product area or user journey.

1. Keep it natural — The best tools fit us, extending and enhancing our skills in ways we understand instinctively.
2. Encourage flow — When we are focused and in a ‘flow state’: we are at our most effective and creative.
3. Embrace dialogue — Debate and discussion brings us together and adds energy to our actions, nuancing our understanding.
4. Consider context — The time, the place, the situation and the participants change how we interact and experience things.

Each of these had a fairly lengthy write up and a series of questions and examples to help people work with them (you can still read about them on the Qlik blog). These worked well inside the design team but their conceptual nature meant that not everyone was comfortable working with them. They helped us describe the vision for the experience, but didn’t really help us address the how it should manifest. But most importantly they didn’t directly reflect the users. They were our philosophies.

This issue of being either too conceptual or too practical was something that we discovered others were also struggling with. The core of the problem lays in understanding who the ‘customers’ of your design principles are. We were coming at things from both ends and missing the middle, and we realised we needed to find ways to communicate with multiple customer groups across the full range.

Once we realised that a single list of design principles wasn’t go to talk to everyone, we started to get a better understanding of why they weren’t getting the traction across the organisation we had hoped for. So we went out to talked to our stakeholders/customers, ran some voice of the customer research to understand what they thought about us (and mattered to them), did some design team workshops to understand what we were about. From this we ended up defining 7 design principles that we believe reflect both who we are and what our customers expect from us. In doing so we also created a fresh approach for how we work with them.

It’s a four tier model that includes the design principles but positions them in relation to other artefacts. The top tier is the company/product mission (what we want to achieve), the second tier is where our design principles sit (how we act to achieve this), the third tier is where the user experiences are defined (which experiences and qualities best support our users in a particular activity), and finally in the fourth tier, we have the UI patterns and guidelines or the design language system (how experiences manifest in the product UI in a unified and consistently ‘Qlik’ way).

For us and our audience, the design principles sit at the design strategy level. They are about shaping the product. Below is an example of how one of our principles; “Don’t waste their time” connects across the different tiers.

This approach has helped us find the best way to talk to the different parts of our audience. It allows the design team to communicate at the strategic level and the granular level, but most importantly it helps us connect the two.

The Qlik Product Design Principles

So that brings us to our 7 design principles. They were created to reflect both who we are and what we aspire to. Here is each of them with a little about what they mean to us:

• Simplify — This is how we innovate, by removing unnecessary complexity yet retaining all the power. It’s how we enable customers to focus on the what rather than the how.
• Don’t Discriminate — Is how we touch a billion lives, broaden analytics, and simplify decision making for everyone, everywhere. It’s about being accessible and fit for context. For our customers it means anyone can get value from our products.
• Create Confidence — This is about execution, growth and building skills. It’s delivering robust engineering and design that’s scalable and high quality. For our customers confidence builds trust and make us the go to product.
• Focus on Value — This helps us prioritise, ensuring everything we create is well thought through. For our customers it results in experiences that satisfy their needs and expectations.
• Bring Joy — It’s the Qlik smile and those details that create the stickiness in our products. For our customers this is how we capture their attention and make them happy, lifetime fans.
• Don’t waste their time — It’s all about performance and efficiency, helping us innovate in ways that have measurable impact with our customers. Their time and attention is valuable. We should make every second worth it.
• Take it further — This drives our ambition to improve and build upon what we have, to innovate and think about what’s that extra touch that will make our products stand out. For our customers, this is when they say “wow!”

I’ll be detailing each of these over the coming weeks and talking more about how we work with them. In the meantime here’s an example of how we share them internally, using flash cards (and of course we have stickers for everyone’s laptops):