Design Principles at Tailwind
Last year, our design team at Tailwind consisted of only 2 Product Designers and 1 Visual designer. Even at this early stage, we understood the importance of working under the same set of values. Our goal was simple: Create a set of Tailwind Design Principles so that the design team has defined guidelines for evaluating and improving designs.
Our Process
We started by figuring out which team members would be valuable to get input from and then mapped out our plan to get everyone involved in the process. For us, this included all of the designers, product team and also some key members of the marketing team. Our team is distributed across two different cities, NYC and OKC, so we wanted to be intentional that our plan made it easy to be involved in the process even if we weren’t all in the same room.
Here are the steps we took to bring our Design Principles to life:
1. Team Survey
To show everyone “here’s why we are doing this” and “here’s how you can help,” we created a team survey to collect everyone’s input. The survey explained what Design principles are and then asked 4 simple questions about how the team thinks about good design. We compiled the answers into a word cloud.
2. Design Principles Workshop #1: Ideation
Next we set up a workshop to define what good design principles look like and how we intended to apply these principles as a team. We also shared real-world examples from well-known companies so our team could better understand how design principles should be applied at both a brand and product level.
Then we put the team to work! We asked the team to spend 10 mins writing down as many design principles they could think of. We spent the rest of the time clustering the ideas into themes. We used Whimsical for this portion of the workshop, which is a great tool for facilitating remote workshops.
3. Design Principles Workshop #2: Vote & Discuss
We left our first workshop with a group of themes that was starting to emerge and everyone feeling excited about being involved in the process. The next step was the hardest part. We had a lot of themes and needed a way to narrow down all our options. We set up a second workshop to vote on the themes and had a wider discussion around what would be most impactful for our team.
For each of the top voted themes, we used the following questions as acceptance criteria to help prioritize which principles would be most impactful for our team:
- Is this true to our team, aka does it reflect our core values?
- Is this unique, specific, and relevant to Tailwind?
- Will this work for both brand and product design and encourage a shared vision for design values?
- Is this applicable across all products and squads?
- Is this memorable?
- Will this help us say no?
- Is this a truism?
- Can this inspire great Tailwind-y design decisions tomorrow?
Introducing, Tailwind Design Principles:
When we had our top themes finalized we were able to translate these into actual principles. This took a couple rounds of iterations to get the words just right. Once we had a finalized version, the design team added real examples to show ways we are already applying these to our brand and our product. We also brainstormed areas where we could apply these principles to our process and product in the future.
It was a great exercise and we left with four Design Principles that the team values:
Everyone Drives Design
We believe that anyone who has an impact on the product is part of the design process. Design is everything from the business strategy to the user interaction to how the database is structured. We know that collectively we’re able to design better products as a diverse team.
Balance Obvious, Easy, and Possible
We make intimidating tasks feel delightfully easy for our members. We take complex systems and make them simple and intuitive. We know our members value a sense of direction and support. We strive to make our designs reflect that by simplifying workflows or layouts to make it easier for our members to take action and make choices.
What’s Vital for Some is Valuable for Everyone
The design team is the voice of the user. We make work more human by championing inclusive and accessible solutions that put our member’s needs first. We know that design solutions that are vital for a minority of our members will also bring value to the majority of our members. Accessible design = usable design
Data Driven Design Over Assumptions
When faced with difficult design decisions we rely on both qualitative and quantitative data from our members to help us come to an agreement. We know that no design is perfect and that the platforms we design for are always evolving. We ship highly usable, high impact features based on validated needs.
How we use them today:
After putting in a fair amount of time and effort to craft our principles, it was only fitting that we put them to actual use! Here are some of the ways in the past year we’ve surfaced our design principles :
- Posters — it wouldn’t be official if they weren’t loud and proud in our office! We created these posters to help keep these top of mind.
- Design Feedback and Crits: We make an effort to frequently bring up our principles when sharing designs we’ve worked on.
- Brunch & Learns: At our teamwide UX brunch and learns we highlight the Design Principle that the topic most relates to.
- Hiring: We include these in our job descriptions and also speak to them in the interview process to help gauge if candidates we are hiring reflect the same values in their own process
Resources you can borrow:
I hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes look at how we created our design principles at Tailwind. If you found this helpful or want more details on our process, let me know!
