developing principles and tenets for a team

Design decision making based on principles

Principles and tenets, a designer’s guiding light. In some ways, it brought meaning and purpose to an otherwise mundane status-quo. I and two other teammates authored these.

role: design team lead

Principles

A list of what our team deemed necessary, valuable, and worthy of effort as designers.

Growth Mindset

• Definition: Seek out innovative ways of designing to improve usability and experience.

• Statement: Think big, challenge the status quo, learn, iterate and optimize.

User First

• Make users’ lives and journeys better through observing, empathizing, building trust, and thinking inclusively.

Craftsmanship

• Craftsmanship is what makes us designers.

• Be thorough, intentional, and practice simplification when creating your work.

• Ask yourself, would I be proud to show this?

Value and Delight

• Create experiences that influence people to want to return to our products.

Tenets

Tenets can be rules of thumb, tips, best practices, or reason “why”. Think of them as ammo for designers. It can be understood as the reasoning behind our decision-making.

Reduce cognitive load

• Simplify, reduce noise by removing truly unnecessary elements. Use fewer words, reduce redundant calls to action.

• Use adequate proximity and spacing

• Use clear hierarchy, familiar behaviors, content efficiency to help with scanability.

Clarity 

• Interactions should have visual feedback or a noticeable response in the interface. Communicate and respond when something happens.

• Use descriptive and easily understandable language and imagery.

Simplicity

• Examine the need for borders, backgrounds, and other unnecessary design flourishes.

• Avoid using color, texture, or imagery, when not specifically helpful to the user.

• Remove or downplay information and items that are non-critical to the user’s immediate goal.

Consistency 

• Reuse styles, patterns, layouts, behaviors, and more both in the UI and UX.

• Share assets and code implementation across our realms and products.

• Use a common vocabulary and nomenclature across the product.

Trust, Familiarity

• Stay consistent through a family of products and behaviors, all should feel like they belong together. 

• Use common or established UI and UX conventions when possible.

• Be predictable.

Flexibility

• Use responsive or fluid design concepts to prevent content and data display issues. 

• Be device and viewport agnostic. 

• Use percentage widths, media queries, define breakpoints

Evolution

• Understanding our product will evolve. Design with the intent that things may change, scale or expand. 

• Iterate and accept you may not have it right the first time.

• Creating a context of imperfect is ok and ownership is shared. Progress, not perfection.

• Get user feedback and adapt.

Reducing friction(sometimes that means adding friction)

• Include considerations for page speed, time on site, and abandonment.

• Track and monitor interaction KPIs

• Be consistent and transparent with users.

• Use fewer steps in task-based experiences.

Content Hierarchy

• Create a content hierarchy based on the needs of the user. 

• Put things in order of most interacted to least. Behavioral order.

• Ask the user to define what is most important to them. Attitudinal order.

• Understand the inverted pyramid concept used in publishing to establish informational order.