How to Establish Design Principles for Your Product
1. Distinguishing three similar-looking concepts
The role of design principles becomes clearer when you separate branding from universal design rules.
- Branding
- The value and personality a brand promises
- Criteria that make consumers feel specific emotions and impressions
- Principles of good design
- Universal design criteria such as contrast, alignment, repetition, balance, and proximity
- Usability principles and heuristics that can be applied even when a product is not involved
- Design principles
- Short statements that contain the values and goals a product or service considers important
- Criteria for making design decisions suited to the product and comparing different options
2. Why the team should create the principles together
Design principles are powerful when they serve as a shared decision-making standard for the team rather than a document belonging only to designers.
- Alignment
- Members agree together on how to implement the product’s purpose through design
- Maintain consistency in the interface and pattern library
- Decision-making
- Quickly compare conflicting goals or options
- Maintain a consistent direction not only in design, but across feature planning and product development as well
3. A two-step design principles workshop
First agree on the character of the product, then turn that character into concrete decision criteria.
- Step 1: Create a product persona — 40 to 60 minutes
- Write sticky-note ideas for 10 to 15 minutes based on quadrant questions
- Present and discuss ideas by individual or group
- Use dot voting to select the elements with the highest resonance
- Integrate the selected elements into a single product persona
- Step 2: Create design principles — 60 to 90 minutes
- Prepare 3 to 4 questions about the ideal user experience and design philosophy
- Freely generate ideas for 5 to 10 minutes per question
- Each person shares two key ideas, and similar opinions are grouped together
- After voting to select the top 5 to 6, develop them into design principle statements
- Share them with the team, revise together, and refine them into usable expressions
4. The goal of the first workshop is shared understanding, not completion
Design principles are not rules that end once they are set, but standards that are refined together with the product.
- Because they are difficult to measure quantitatively, it is hard to expect a perfect result from a single workshop
- More important than the completeness of the first wording is the process of revealing how members perceive the product
- After the workshop, the designer and the team continue to improve them while applying them to real decision-making
