How to develop Design Principles: The Stash Way

Published in

stashinvest

6 min readDec 18, 2017

I wrote this piece documenting the process in developing Stash’s V1 of Design Principles. The goal for this is not to serve as a 1:1 step-by-step process, but to serve as a guide or resource for growing Product and Design teams. And overall, this is for those looking to establish a founding voice in order to innovate and make sound design decisions.

What is Stash?

Stash is investing, simplified. Our technology makes it easy for anyone to start investing with as little as $5. We provide guidance, and help investors learn the basics so they can do it themselves.

Why does Stash need Design Principles?

As a rapid growing startup, our product and engineering teams are constantly creating experiences and shipping often. We are a lean team and firmly believe in learning and iterating quickly. However, we encountered a design consistency dilemma. From a Product Design perspective, we often made decisions that were sort of off-the-cuff and were inconsistent in approach.

What we want is to increase impact, innovation, and align on what’s important and push design forward without losing sight of our ultimate vision. One solution is to brainstorm a set of guiding principles that will help us make better design decisions and align on what’s important and valuable as a company.

What was my approach?

My first step was to conduct research and find best practices for Design Principles. Design principles are meant to be broad, not prescriptive. They should not define an exact detail of your product, that is “Our buttons are always purple with hex code #5342F4” or “Our font style for headlines are 16pt bold.” Instead, they should be framed as broader statements, “Our visual language is minimalistic, simple and focused.” The goal is to use them for any project with any context.

I conducted a competitive analysis and looked into how other companies structure their guiding principles. I found Design Principles FTW, which has a massive repository of Design Principles by various industries and product types. I saved the ones that best aligned with our product vision. Facebook, Google, Asana and Apple amongst others, were some of the ones that really stood out. I presented my findings with our Product Management team and we voted on the design principles that we wanted to strive towards.

Brainstorm Session 1: Product Management Team

I posed the following questions to the Product Management Team:

How would you characterize our current design system?
Of your responses, what resonates the most?
What could be clearer?

10 minutes were put on the clock to allow the group to start answering these questions. Once finished, I went around the room and wrote down their answers on a whiteboard separated in columns.

Once their opinions were on the board, I asked the group, “What resonates most?” represented by the stars. And of those answers, I asked “Which ones could be clearer?”, represented by underlines. After the meeting, I compiled the list of answers and grouped them into common themes:

What resonated the most:

Simple
Fun
Empathetic

What needs clarity:

Intelligent
Social
How users grow/become knowledgeable

Brainstorm Session 2: Design Team

Next, I met with the Design Team and asked the same questions. These were the results:

What resonated the most:

Efficient
Friendly
Understanding

What needs clarity:

Encouraging/Educational
Simple and Clear
Approachable & Playful

Outcome and V1

After collecting thoughts from both teams, I compared thoughts and instantly noted common themes between both teams. Next step was to digest this information and form descriptions for each of the statements. After 2–3 rounds of feedback and iterating, here’s Stash’s V1 Design Principles:

Approachable & Supportive
We are friendly and understanding. Our product is accessible to those who are excited to learn about investing. Our customers come to us to find comfort in the financial market and we welcome them, while others have turned them away.
Personal
We talk to our customers frequently in order to capture their thoughts and the emotion they get from using our product. We relate to them and take time to understand their individual needs. We test our designs with our customers to validate our decisions. We develop a long-lasting relationship and build trust. We understand everyone’s situation is different and cater to their unique capabilities and goals.
Clear & Efficient
We believe visual hierarchy is important. We use familiar elements so our design is consistent and customers can easily locate the things they need. Our design is harmonious; less is more. We simplify wherever possible to save our customers’ time. We are transparent about the what and the why. We distract only when it is relevant to the customer. It should take no more than a few taps to find what they’re looking for, making our product useful and frictionless for new, intermediate, and advanced customers.
Empowering
We believe in financial literacy. We break down jargon so our customers get a deeper understanding of investing. We encourage and enable our customers to become smarter, build confidence and mature. Our platform helps customers set their own financial goals and achieve them. We motivate them to keep up the good work and encourage them to ride the ups and downs of the market and invest for the long term. When our customers run into a problem, we present them with the choices to achieve their goals quickly.

Closing thoughts & learnings

In developing these Design Principles, I have learned a couple of things. I had to do some strategic thinking into how to get the best unbiased opinions from my peers. I met with the Product Management Team to get their thoughts as a group. Then, shortly after, met with the Design Team. I felt this was important to compare answers and see themes between the two teams.

As your develop your first Design Principles, know that they can evolve over time. As your product grows and mature, you’ll start to introduce new experiences and new elements of design. If those elements start to pivot out of your current set of principles, challenge yourself and team to see if this experience is necessary to grow as a product. If not, try to align it back to your core principles, if so, strategize and iterate on your current set to incorporate this new experience.

It’s also important to note that this process took about 2 weeks, from initial competitive analysis, to speaking with PMs and PDs, to multiple feedback rounds. Something to keep in mind is to involve anyone who you believe has direct access to product, but try to keep the audience to small group. The goal is to make sure everyone’s voice is heard. Feedback and collaboration is the foundation of any great team.

To ensure that everyone is truly aligned with your principles, post them at eye level everywhere around the office. Make sure people hear them constantly; it will help drive conversations when making product decisions now into the future of your product.