3 Tips for better visual design on an agile team.

In product design, there’s a hierarchy that all great companies or teams move through. First, create a product that solves a problem or satisfies a desire. Second, make it easy to understand and use. And thirdly, make it beautiful.

I’ve noticed that most product designers will try to focus on one of these three aspects at a time. Often repressing visual design until the team is ready for it. That doesn’t necessarily have to be the case.

Here are 3 tips for moving toward improving your visual design in a highly iterative environment, on a fast paced collaborative team.

1. Create a design system.

An example of a styleguide page within your sketch file.

Starting with a template will help you move quickly. Then continuously build upon a set of UI components that will help you iterate faster — and set them up to easily update throughout your iterations. Here’s the one that I use for myself.

A very specific example would be your margin and padding system — are you choosing 15–30–60px? Are you applying it to all the new screens you’re creating? Something small like this is easy to keep track of, and you’ll see the effects of the visual…