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:
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.