Aligning a decentralized design team
In this story, I will shed a light on why and how we deviated from what is common when using design principles to align multiple designers across different teams.
Origin
Over the years Jumbo worked with a lot of different agencies that helped us out with design and development. Since this year we started the Jumbo Tech Campus. One of the cool things we’re doing is creating our own in-house teams.
The legacy of working with a lot of external agencies is still visible on our website and app today. Each agency has their own taste in design, way of working and use their own pieces of code. There was no consistency throughout our digital products.
After analyzing our websites we found 4 different kinds of tab components that all did the exact same thing. On top of that, 20+ different button styles, 10+ different recipe cards and 8 ways of displaying links.
Such a waste of development time and consistency.
Cleaning up
Today we have our own group of talented UX designers. This gives us an opportunity to create a more consistent look & feel. This will lead to a better user experience and a more sustainable way of developing. But how do you align designers across different scrum teams?
We started with 2 initiatives.
The first initiative is creating a Style Guide that includes a set of components. With this style guide, we would avoid ending up with 20 different ways of displaying a button. To save you some time I decided not to write a story about how we did set up our Style Guide. Maybe I’ll write an article about that later.
However, in this article, I would like to talk about our second initiative, our design principles.
Design principles are holistic design decisions that help with creating detailed user interfaces. It aligns designers to walk the same path while working on different parts of a customer journey.
Design principles
Design principles are common in our work field. That’s why we first analyzed how other companies formulated theirs. We concluded that a lot of principles from big brands are very generic and broad to use in our context.
Some famous examples: ‘Clean’, ‘transparent’, ‘friendly’ and ‘guidance’. As you can imagine these principles leave a lot of room for interpretation and can fit with any brand. This wasn’t the solution to get our designers aligned.
I discovered this article of Jared M. Spool (https://articles.uie.com/creating-design-principles/). He explains why generic design principles are beautiful but not so practical. In very short summary, his answer to successful design principles is to add more details. With more details, designers can use them as a way to reflect on their design proposals. Jared’s article inspired me to take a different approach to Jumbo’s design principles. Thanks for that Jared!
Detailed design principles
So what did we do? We started by hosting a design workshop. In the workshop, we came up with 7 principles. Instead of using generic principles as described above we kept Jared’s advice in mind. Add more details! Here’s one of them
“A touch of yellow to guide a user”
In our case, we’re not just saying “guidance”, that leaves to much room for interpretation. We described it in a what (a touch of yellow) and a why (to guide a user). Besides that, we added 4 other elements:
- Keywords: The executive summary of the principle. Useful for colleagues that don’t need to understand everything in detail. E.g. product owners and business stakeholders.
- Requirements: A checklist of things you should take into account when designing.
- Ask yourself: A set of questions that help the designer reflect on the impact and the quality of the design decision.
- Examples: Screenshots that show how this principle is being used in practical examples.
These 4 elements focus on using the principles while designing. They function as a tool to help designers reflect on their work. This eventually leads to a more consistent user experience and, better designers!
Results
Since we started using more detailed design principles, this led to the following changes:
- Our discussions are less about individual opinions and more about our shared design language
- Our on boarding for new design employees is faster and more efficient
- In case designers get lost they use the principles as a compass to get them back on the right path
- Designers have better alignment while they work on a different part of the customer journey
Together with our design principles and our style guide we improve our digital presence and offer customers a more consistent experience.
I’m curious how other design teams use design principles and if you’ve had similar or different experiences. Feel free to share your comments and thoughts in the comments below.
