Building Design Principles

Do no evil. Speak softly and carry a big stick. If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

Profound or not, nearly every great business, notable person and modern mom has some kind of principle that leads their life. Just as life shouldn’t be led on accident, neither should good design, and certainly not great design.

As the UX team at Glidewell grows, we decided now was the time to establish our own set of design principles. We gathered together in a designer-led brainstorming workshop, and got down to the business of solidifying our design principles.

Forward Thinking:

We strive to anticipate peoples’ needs, wants and goals, without being limited by existing constraints.

Unfortunately, all designers are constrained by the bounds of reality, which means no magic and certainly no abilities to gaze into the future. What we are able to do is envision how our current systems/products could be adapted to future automation capabilities, or certain components removed per business needs. We need not be constrained by our current users’ expectations of what something should look like, and certainly not by our own.

Adaptive:

We consider the context of all different types of people and tailor the experience to them.

There’s something good to be said for inclusive design in general, but at Glidewell we have very tangible examples of what this looks like for our employees. With over 50+ nationalities, a multitude of languages that came before English, and a great span of ages represented, we have a strong incentive, if not a compassionate obligation to design for a large variety of users. I might add that our customers, the dentist, are no different!

Efficient:

We create systems that help people accomplish their tasks with relative ease and speed.

Designing with efficiency in mind keeps our work focused on the end user and their end goal. Just as we create repeatable components for our own efficiency, we want to reduce the mental load of the user using any application we design.

On any given day, just one of our three facilities receives over a thousand dental cases, which are then processed within hours. From the applications needed to scan cases into our system, to the CRM that manages customer details, there is little room for error, or software bloat, with such a high volume.

Knowing the speed at which most cases need to get through our lab, about 3 working days, we design knowing that every second counts!

Credit: lukew

Unity:

We create solutions that work together harmoniously so that people can seamlessly collaborate with one another to accomplish a task.

Whether it be in daily stand-ups or team critiques, our team members are always running ideas and research by each other to ensure that none of our applications or overarching services are operating independently of each other.

If done well, the end user can’t tell where one designer’s work begins or ends within the same application — on the other hand, if any segment isn’t aligned with the whole, it sticks out like a squeaky wheel.

Conclusion

As we enter each new design and user problem, these principles will remain top of mind. Not only will our solutions always be framed by user needs and business requirements, but also our design principles.