Solaria Labs User Experience Principles

Here at Solaria Labs — the innovation incubator at Liberty Mutual Insurance, and my home as a senior product designer and UX generalist — we’ve given a lot of thought into what makes for good user experience, and distilled it down to the following key principles. Knowing these is enough for the tl;dr version, but to dig a little deeper into what makes us tick, take a few minutes to read on. It’s worth it, we promise.

1. Good UX begins with research and testing.
2. Good UX plays well with the business.
3. Good UX plays well with developers.
4. Good UX is consistent, systematic and atomic.
5. Good UX is simple, efficient and intuitive.
6. Good UX has a delight-full, distinct personality.
7. Good UX inspires trust.

Principle #1: Good UX begins with research and testing.

Before we design anything, we have to know what we need to design — and before that, why we need to design. This means research and testing come before any deliverables, and it means defining and understanding the underlying problems before we look for solutions to them. We don’t waste time solving the wrong problems, even if solving problems feels good.

We’re committed to a wide range of testing methodologies because we have a variety of users, a variety of products, and a variety of problems and hypotheses. This might mean we don’t use every sort of user test for every product — and that’s OK.

We acknowledge that intuition is powerful, but not foolproof. Our life stories, culture, cognitive styles and aesthetic preferences can be very different from our users’, so we know intuition can only get us so far — and it can even create a false sense of security. (That said, we absolutely let our previous adventures in user testing inform our future design work.)

It’s obvious that early-stage testing saves time and wasted effort, but it’s true throughout the entire design process, too. If something doesn’t make sense while we’re designing, it’s our responsibility to stop and ask as many questions as necessary until we understand enough to keep going. This doesn’t mean we have to have everything pinned down all the time (that’s not Agile) but it does mean we need to bake in the time for ongoing research and testing as iterations continue — or risk going down the wrong path.

Principle #2: Good UX plays well with the business.

A UX team is at its most useful when it’s an integral part of the greater corporate culture. We aim to be visible and valuable within Solaria Labs (and Liberty Mutual) by leveraging our wide-ranging expertise on a team-by-team, project-by-project basis, while also leveling up our skills via ongoing education, curiosity, and balanced critique from within and without.

Before we design, we define goals and KPIs — because as our process continues, these apply to the entire product, to each specific screen, and even to key elements on a screen. Every UX element we build needs to map to a measurable business goal. (Yes, “delight the user” should be a business goal.) Note, too, that good research helps us define KPIs.

We always enjoy nerding out on new ideas and experiments, but only ones that don’t disrupt or conflict with our core business values. We will never pursue a project or product unless it’s in the user’s best interest, nurtured by the business.

We design iteratively and with increasing specificity, because this is how Agile business works. We won’t do high-fidelity design until enough low-fi work has been tested and approved to ensure that we’re not wasting effort — there’s no point in discussing button colors if we’re validating concepts. After all, as design fidelity increases, so does our resistance to change … and the cost of such change when it occurs.

Principle #3: Good UX plays well with developers.

We design for iterative, modular development practices. Even if a project doesn’t have any plans post-MVP (yet), our goal is to design something that’s modular enough to easily accommodate continuous improvement. Think Legos, not log cabins.

We also design for performance. We won’t ask a developer to build something shiny when they — or we — suspect it will be slow. Shininess is just icing on the cake, after all.

Principle #4: Good UX is consistent, systematic and atomic.

If we have one UX axiom to rule them all, it’s this: Always be consistent. Consistency …

• Reduces overall cognitive load
• Enables intuitiveness and learnability, making it easier for users to accept new features or flows over time
• Reinforces your product’s personality through a unified visual or textual voice (this applies to “white-labeled” elements you’ve brought in from someone else, too!)
• Implies stability and inspires trust

Our commitment to consistency considers the larger landscape in which our products live. Every OS has its own design patterns we must acknowledge. At an even wider level, people have been using the internet for decades now — which means that whether or not we approve, there are basic design patterns that we ignore at our own peril.

We know that while we can sometimes “solve” problems by deviating from consistency, this is almost always too high a price to pay. When faced with situations like this, it’s usually better to refrain from a feature altogether, or dial it down in order to stay consistent.

We know that establishing a strong design system early on keeps us from wasting work or alienating users. While a constantly-changing UX might seem “iterative”, it actually destroys trust. Minor change may go over just fine, but it’s better in the long run to take time to build tested and reasonably fully-formed experiences than to iterate significantly on major UX paradigms.

We are committed to “atomic design” at an organization-wide level. Solaria’s role as a rapid incubator may mean we shouldn’t roll out detailed design systems for each project — but our overall design methodology can still be a framework-based one that encourages the atomic design of modular, extensible, swappable elements that map to similar building blocks in code. This includes making the most of widely-utilized open source design frameworks, as well as standardizing functional and visual patterns between products whenever practical.

Principle #5: Good UX is simple, efficient and intuitive.

In short, we are committed to improving the signal-to-noise ratio of our products. More specifically…

• We design task-based products that rely on contextual wayfinding cues, clear information hierarchies, and action-based information architecture in order to help users get their stuff done faster
• We automate processes whenever possible (i.e. auto-filled forms) and hide conditional information whenever practical (i.e. pop-up text for definitions you’ll only read once or twice)
• We limit distractions and design for consecutive (not concurrent) tasks, because people can’t really multitask
• We remove choices unless they’re critical to the outcome … or delightful enough to be worth the cognitive cost
• We aren’t ashamed to borrow patterns from Google, Facebook, Mac OS, or anyone else who has done what we’re trying to do either better or more pervasively

We believe that every element in a design must have a clear purpose. If something doesn’t add to the overall positivity of the user experience, it shouldn’t be there.

We reduce cognitive workload by enabling intuition. What does this actually mean? Because intuition happens on an unconscious level, the more we enable it, the less we sacrifice the two types of cognitive workload: the effort it takes to do a specific task (intrinsic load), and the effort to understand an interface as a whole (germane load).

Principle #6: Good UX has a delight-full, distinct personality.

We believe that a good product isn’t just easy to use; it’s also feels good to use. Depending on the product, this might mean we are warm, witty, kind, whimsical or whatever — but whatever we are, we need to be it consistently.

We know the best design is by humans, for humans. Good UX assumes the user will be tired, distracted, stressed or feeling under the weather, and accommodates this with grace, compassion and good humor. At our best, we’re transparent and humane; we explain why we do what we do, and we do so in a way that doesn’t sound like a robot, a Magic 8 Ball, or a TV infomercial.

We know when to blend in and when to stand out. Our users see hundreds of digital services every day, and sometimes it’s better to be a face in the crowd. When we’re quirky, we’re quirky for a reason, not to compensate for less-than-optimal UX or just to be that kid who raises his hand every time the teacher asks a question. A product doing its job well tickles one part of the brain; a product displaying personality tickles a different part. Done well, this inspires empathy, even affection — done poorly, it has the opposite result.

Principle #7: Good UX inspires trust.

We believe that trust makes life easier for the user as well as the business. If we design intuitive, consistent experiences, we build trust, increasing conversion and making it more likely our product will become “invisible”, ubiquitous and friction-free over time.

We believe that trust hinges upon providing good feedback and setting realistic expectations. Particularly in a beta-release environment like Solaria Labs, it’s important for trust’s sake not to overpromise and underdeliver. And giving feedback is critical to building trust for a number of reasons, whether on a micro-interaction level (is an action non-responsive or is the whole app broken?) or on a larger scale (a user is more likely to complete a multi-screen flow if she knows she’s on the last step of the process).