Guidelines for thoughtful product design

Over the last few years I’ve been working on a set of guidelines that both my team members and students can use to help judge if a product is well designed.

I owe a great debt of gratitude to Dieter Rams and Ben Shneiderman for their work putting down design principles, as well as Don Norman and many others who have written thoughtfully about design. I wanted a set of design guidelines that could bridge digital and physical product design, as so many products rely on both diciplines. I created this set of principles that can work for a variety of product design situations, and would take into account our modern, interconnected world.

No product is an island. Good product design acknowledges that. Many principles are high-level precepts to keep in mind when building a product. I wanted something that could accomplish that while also being a check list of important considerations during product design and development.

You can use the below guidelines to check if your product is ready to ship (or if your prototype is being thoughtful enough), and you can use it as a core way to critique other products.

Not all guidelines will apply to all situations. I encourage you to combine this with other guidelines and methodologies and to find the right mix for your work.

This is version 1.0, and I intend to update these as needed.

Here are my Guidelines for thoughtful product design

Users are engaged with during the design process
It’s not user-centered design or user experience, if users aren’t involved. We should engage with a diverse set of users and seek to understand their problems. Beware of accidentally designing for symptoms instead of problems. Initial problems are usually symptoms and further probing and research will be needed. Also be careful not to ask users what they want built. Our role as designers is to discover their problems and to create thoughtful solutions.

Design for actions, not individuals
Design for actions and your product should be useful for a lot of people. Design for individuals, or even tasks, and your product may be too narrowly tailored to how only some people think. Design for an individual, and…