How we created Design Principles for SaaS software, consulting and creative agency
Building a company is like having a relationship. This stereotype could go so many ways, but what I mean is: being on the inside, everyone thinks theirs is unique.
Acknowledging that, I still believe that the way we operate is different to most young businesses out there. We have 3 autonomous yet symbiotic teams forming a single customer experience, so our challenge is:
How do we cultivate one common design voice across our SaaS software, consulting services and creative agency?
Enter design principles.
Business value of design
First, let’s explore the most important question: why bother?
Moore’s Law originated in the early 70s and states that processor speeds for computers will double every two years. For decades, new generations of tech were enough to buy a new product. Even though this is still relevant today (think smartphone releases), its efficacy is diminishing and we have enough processing power. Therefore we aren’t driven to buy it because it’s faster or has more memory. Now we buy it because of how it makes us feel.
The frontier for generating new value is expanding deeper and deeper into the realms of design and the business world is taking notice: The dmi:Design Value Index analyses the performance of companies committed to design as an integral part of their business strategy.
2015 results show that over the last 10 years design-led companies outperform the S&P by an extraordinary 211%. And that’s even before the dominant era of user experience heavyweights such as Airbnb, Atlassian or even Uber.
In case people still had doubts, other sources and John Maeda’s Design in Tech Report back the argument of leveraging design as a core driver of value for business. Running an innovation consultancy with a SaaS platform at the heart of what we do wouldn’t be possible without the widespread use of design as a strategic capability. It’s 2020 after all.
Why we needed design principles
In the early days of Pollen8, we were bursting with energy and struggling for orientation. We set out to bring structure, rigour and elegance to the world of innovation and as we grew, we achieved more impact. But this also meant more work, and in return, resulted in more touch points with our brand and we started to lack consistency.
We had a product team designing and building an enterprise SaaS platform, a consulting team delivering projects with clients and a creative agency struggling to keep everything together. How can analytics dashboards, strategy workshops and brand campaigns all feel like Pollen8, despite needing such different logics to design them respectively?
No amount of rules, design solutions or coordination could compensate for the rapid pace of decision making in our teams, and we worried about losing the common identity of our interdisciplinary offering. It was essential that we own our own design ethos and incorporate an instantly identifiable feel of Pollen8-ness to everything we create.
It felt important to me to not solve the problem with restrictions, but rather co-create an approach that wouldn’t interfere with the different requirements of our disciplines. As a solution, company values were too abstract, branding guidelines missed the point. We needed a principle agreement on the question: What do we consider to be “good design” at Pollen8?
How we got here
The first meeting made us realise that the challenge was actually more complex than this simple question. Our teams design different solutions to solve different problems in different contexts. So the actual question evolved into: How can we combine our distinct perspectives to agree on one shared view of good design?
Success criteria
At the intersection of branding, UI design, client solutions, marketing campaigns and user experience lies an elusive sweet spot. That’s exactly what we wanted to reach and defining success criteria helped us understand if we were focusing on the right angle:
- Create one cross-departmental design voice of Pollen8
- Fix lack of a “gold standard”, a common understanding of great design
- Cover not only how we look, but also how we sound
- We can discuss quality standards without distractions by personal preferences
Quality metrics
By researching how others approached this challenge and comparing the many different forms shapes design principles can have, we were able to establish quality metrics for what we wanted to be true of ours:
- Be genuine (e.g. “bring delight”)
- Be opinionated (e.g. “direction over choice”)
- Be memorable (e.g. “Grandma first”, one of our favourite references in terms of language was from Wonderbly)
- No obvious opposite (e.g. “usable — unusable”)
Prioritising uniqueness
The final piece in the puzzle was a set of base questions, which guided our conversations and reminded us to prioritise what reflects our uniqueness when it comes to history, type of work, and design ethos in our company:
- Is this specifically true for our teams?
- Is this unique to Pollen8?
- Will this work equally well for product, branding and other disciplines?
- Does this exist in our design decisions today?
- Can it inspire great design tomorrow?
We started in December and finalised the language in April. It felt important to take our time to truly empathise with the variety of challenges that each of us hoped we could fix. The design principles are the result of an honest and truly interdisciplinary conversation and probably my favourite collaboration in our company history.
Pollen8’s design principles
This set of design principles is our guiding framework to assess choices we make on a daily basis. It allows us to give each other constructive feedback so we can challenge ourselves and deliver the best work that we can.
Order the chaos. (Design Principle #1)
What we do: Like a competent guide, we think one step ahead and navigate humans effortlessly through complex situations. We design considered experiences that allow them to focus on the core objective at hand.
This results in: Our audience feels confident in their journey and is excited about reaching their goal, trusting that we are here to provide support when needed.
Be ready to achieve. (Design Principle #2)
What we do: Like cooking a meal with all ingredients already set out, we prepare to remove distractions on a productive journey. Our simple and intuitive tools add real value to everyone who interacts with the world of Pollen8.
This results in: Even the hardest tasks seem surprisingly easy. Achieving goals feels too smooth to be true and humans are empowered to go further and further.
Add personal delight. (Design Principle #3)
What we do: We create experiences that feel friendly and approachable, satisfy the needs of our audience, and acknowledge what emotions they go through.
This results in: Like having a conversation with an old friend over coffee, our audiences feel welcome and understood, no matter how challenging the situation may be.
Wrap it in Pollen8. (Design Principle #4)
What we do: We champion many disciplines into one holistic experience by relying on each other’s skills and insights. We celebrate together and pick ourselves up together.
This results in: Our company values are embodied in all designs that see the light of day, so all interactions can feel like being hugged by the whole Pollen8 team.
Epilogue *
Looking back at this process a year later, I realise how this journey has been equally as important as the actual outcomes. We’ve since been through a rebrand, and the design solutions we are proud of can be directly traced back to what we were desperate to articulate with those four principles.
Today we use them to discuss how new features can best fit into existing user journeys and to conduct UI design reviews on the Pollen8 platform. They provide us with a common language and more objective arguments instead of pushing for personal preferences. We apply them to evaluate copywriting on campaigns, design proposals with complex workflows, or workshop materials for diverse audiences, and obviously we hung them on our office walls.
They have become a mantra that I subconsciously repeat while arranging shapes and colours or preparing briefings for new projects. They are what we believe is good design at Pollen8.
*After writing this story I had a chat with our product owner Euan, who described the results as more of an ideal world that he loved to be true. In reality, “it’s f*cking silly hard to implement it in everything we do”, he admits. We should be checking ourselves more, and I promise to myself do that with more rigour. Maybe that’s the story, how to consequently use those tools that we know work so well?
