At CircleCI, different design principles had been developed in the past for the visual design team and the product design team. They were created by one or two people no longer with the company. The overall user experience org had grown significantly(4x) in the mean time. I took the lead on developing new design principles for our organization.
In order to create new principles, we brought the entire UX org together (around 20 people)
Across 5 sessions, we created the design principles with the following steps:
Reviewing inspirational examples of principles. We looked outward to see what other design organizations had done.
Ideation - each team member came up with 3 principles
Voting - each team member voted on their favorite principles. We affinity grouped them into sections. We had a theme for each section.
Discussion - We discussed the highest voted design principles and came to a conclusion of which principles to move forward with.
Descriptions - All of us came together and created descriptions, then refined the descriptions through voting
Prioritization - With the help of research ops, we set up a prioritization survey.
From these steps, we aligned on the following design principles:
Problems before solutions
Define and understand who, what, why before moving forward with a solution.
Think holistically
Not in siloes. When solving a problem, consider where it fits in the user journey and the broader context of the product.
System clarity
Create a clear sense of cause and effect — users should always know what they did, why something happened, and what comes next.
Do the hard work so our users don’t have to
Choose ease of use over ease of design and development.
Simple things simple, complex things possible
Simple experiences form the foundation of our work. Complexity can be added later, but only if it’s needed.
80/20 rule
Focus on making the experience great for 80% of use cases.
Practice great craftsmanship
Do not settle at functional. Ensure the clarity, usability, craftsmanship, consistency, and accessibility of what you deliver.
We lastly brought these principles into our daily design work for iteration and feedback. We did a "roadshow" of the principles to product management, in order to get support across the organization.