Product design principles & keeping yourself on track
Bryce York
AI/ML/LLM and UX-centric B2B startup product management leader with a love for zero-to-one product innovation ? 12+ yrs PM, 7+ yrs AI/ML, 5+ yrs adtech ? Writer/Speaker ? Advisor
Design principles are one of the most used tools in my product management toolbox. Having pre-established guidelines to help shape your solution goes a long way to helping drive consistency and streamlining tradeoff decisions
Design principles act as strategic guard rails - they help keep you going in the direction you want to go.
An example - at a past company, our product was heavily reliant on Wordpress (in a good way) but had too frequently used Custom Fields as part of the configuration and formatting interface. Our team’s design principle was NO custom fields for publishing purposes. Here’s why...
There’s not an exhaustive list of pre-defined custom fields, so the publisher has to remember what the key is eg show_advanced_author_box. The fields were plain text, so something that needed to be true/false wasn’t just a checkbox and instead had to be a specific text snippet.
These snippets included true, True, 1, and yes. Custom field data isn’t version controlled, so if someone changed it you couldn’t track when the change was made and by whom.
By having a design principle - which had been endorsed by the internal champion/sponsor - we always had a strong case to say NO when tempted to go the easy route of a custom field as deadlines loomed and scope creeped.
When do you come up with design principles? For me it’s part of the project kickoff but is a living “document” in many ways. As you dig into the project, you’ll see new design principles that should be defined for your product. Getting stakeholder buy-in is a game changer, do it.
Other design principles I’ve had in the past: no drag and drop. Minimize tooltip usage. Many related to SEO. Many related to a11y. Many related to speed/performance.
One thing to keep in mind - less is more. While you’ll want to keep these prominently documented, everyone in the team should have them front of mind. After all, the best design principles save you from temptation — and temptation catches us all out once in a while.
NB: these are really product-specific design principles but that’s kind of a mouthful!
Looking for inspiration? https://principles.design is a swipe file of other companies’ design principles. Not everyone will define design principles the same way I do, but there’s some good inspiration here anyway.
Sr. Manager, Growth Design @ Grammarly | Be like water.
4 年design principles are very helpful in aligning the user experience with the product vision. I would even level up principles to something greater than specific practices eg no drag and drop. For example, “Delightfully Easy” whereas delightful is when user research has uncovered user needs so clearly the app appears to anticipate such needs and the implementation is effortless for the user to interact with. I think there’s a difference between principles, goals, constraints and success metrics.