Let Your Principles Be Your Guide
How the Sumo Logic UX Team defined a set of principles to guide our design process.
As product designers, our job is to get inside the minds of our users. We’re responsible for understanding the challenges and frustrations they face when they use our product, and design solutions to fix those.
The design team at Sumo Logic has always aimed to keep our designs focused on the users and solving their problems. But until recently, we weren’t able to succinctly articulate the principles that drove our designs. This often made it difficult to determine if our designs were successful and reflected our values as a company.
We realized we needed to formalize a set of shared beliefs to align our designs — a north star to guide our vision and help us decide which compromises to make. But more importantly, we wanted these commandments to help us communicate our values and beliefs to the organization and demystify how we make a lot of our design decisions.
What do we care about the most? What makes us, us?
Defining the Principles
We spent time brainstorming and discussing what we thought our principles were, using an open-ended exercise to generate as many ideas as possible. We threw out words and phrases that represent our philosophy as designers, asking ourselves questions to guide the discussion:
- How do we want our users to feel when they use the product?
- Who’s our audience?
- What’s our tone? How do we talk to our users?
- What makes us unique?
- What do we want to be known for as a company?
Answering these questions narrowed us in on who we are and who we aren’t. It helped us realize where we focus our efforts and how we determine our priorities.
After the brainstorming exercise, we consolidated the ideas into a manageable set where each idea was a stand-alone word or phrase representing a single design philosophy.
We transferred these ideas to post-its to do a card sorting exercise. The card sorting allowed us to organize the ideas into high-level categories which eventually turned into our core set of principles.
We split into two teams. Each team used the same set of post-its and was instructed to group them into 4–7 categories. After the exercise we discussed which of our categories were similar and where we differed.
We ended up with nine categories:
- Trust the User and the User Will Trust You
- Engage with the User
- Empower the User
- Make Data-Driven Decisions
- Use Design Patterns
- We’re in it with our Users
- Delight the User
- Learning from our Users
- Iterative Design Process
Then we had to do the hard part — edit the list down. We wanted the principles to be short and memorable, so they would be ingrained in our minds while we designed. After eliminating a few principles and renaming some others, we crafted our final list, in no particular order:
1. Guide the User
Our users should never feel overwhelmed or confused. Provide contextual walkthroughs, tooltips, and onboarding to reduce their fear. Break large workflows into smaller, digestible tasks. Improve discoverability of features and provide users with a clear path to additional help without getting in their way.
2. Make Data-Driven Decisions
Use customer feedback, interviews, and user testing to ensure we’re on the right path. Define KPIs and measures of success with a focus on quantitative results. Use this information to inform future designs and determine where we focus our time.
3. Trust the User
Because our users are highly technical, we have the advantage that they usually know what they’re doing. We shouldn’t make them confirm every action they take or continually treat them like novices. Instead, we should provide maximum power and flexibility to facilitate their paths to becoming experts. Try to strike the right balance between guiding the user (Principle #1) and trusting them to know what they’re doing.
4. We’re in it with Our Users
Listen to what our users are saying. Put ourselves in their shoes. Build empathy for our users by trying to understand their thought processes, emotions, and mental models. Act like we’re a member of their team — when they fail, we fail.
5. Provide the Most Value Possible
Use tools like value propositions to make sure we’re building the right thing for the user’s needs, and not just our our best guess. Focus our efforts on the 20% of features that will make 80% of the impact.
6. Empower the User
Provide our users with the tools they need right at their fingertips so they can get their job done quickly and efficiently. This will build their confidence and encourage them to become an advocate for our product.
Following this set of design principles has helped us to become more strategic with what we choose to work on and remain focused on our objectives. They make us more efficient by narrowing down our options, which allows us to arrive at the right solution faster.
What’s next?
We hope to integrate these more fully into our project briefs and product development process. The principles need to be baked into the success criteria for every new project and feature that gets shipped. They need to become second nature, continually referenced in our design critiques and internalized within the company.
As a result, our product will become more focused, cohesive, and achieve our ultimate goal of solving our users’ problems.
