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Design Principles
Table of contents
What is Design Principles?
Design Principles is a card from the Team Tactics deck by Pip Decks.
Design principles enable you to make great design decisions. Ask yourself: will this principle clearly guide me when making design decisions? If it doesn’t, get rid of it.
For example:
Good: one primary action per screen.
Bad: keep the number of actions per screen to a minimum.
Run Productivity Blueprint beforehand to determine who to invite. Use Communication Matrix afterwards.
When to use Design Principles
- Inconsistent design decisions across the team
- Lack of clarity in design processes
- High levels of design-related rework
- Difficulty in maintaining brand consistency
- Challenges in scaling design efforts
- Frequent design disagreements within the team
- Need for a unified design vision
How to use Design Principles
- Ask each person to write down all the ingredients required for good design to happen in your organisation, one per sticky note.
For example: design and test your work with real people.
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Share and Theme Sort the answers.
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Create a grid; use each theme (and the notes it includes) as a column heading. Add a row for each person.
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Ask everyone to write a summary for each theme (or ‘principle’) and add it to their row.
For example: observe behaviour and gather evidence. Work with subject experts and existing research. Do not rely on hunches.
- Use Private Vote to choose which principles to keep.
- Use Write In Plain English to write your final draft. See how your new principles work in a Design Crits session, amend as needed and then do a Retro.
Tip: make your principles practical. Choose eight principles at most. Keep them short; you can print a good principle on a mug.
