The principle of design principles
Your team’s not dysfunctional – you just need shared principles.
Imagine this: you are a designer at the product company Bit+Bite. Your team is designing a new feature, but lately you’ve been mired in endless, heated arguments about design decisions. Today, it seems that nobody can agree on anything.
Judy questions whether a fullscreen menu makes sense. Jason debates the need for a menu at all. Sarah wants a photo of her pet badger in there, somewhere. Emotions flare, egos are bruised and everyone leaves the meeting late, vexed, and ready for a drink.
This is a common scenario, but not for the reasons you’d think. Your team doesn’t need group therapy. Your team needs shared design principles.
Daily Decisions
You can think of a company as the output of a series of decisions. After all, a product wouldn’t exist without the decisions around what it is, who it’s for, why it exists, who to hire to create it, what tools to use to make it, etc.
For that matter, life itself is but a series of decisions. Consider your morning: hitting the snooze button, brushing your hair, taking a new route to work – these are all decisions, nested among many others. Heck, even indecision is a decision not to make a decision.
But what if even the most innocuous decision you made was weighed down by debate and uncertainty. If brushing your teeth was not automatic, but began with a heated, internal debate (“Why am I doing this? Why does it matter? What is the meaning of life?”) , how would you ever make difficult decisions?
Thankfully, humans have ingrained tactics to help make these every-day decisions: principles.
Life Principles
When you brush your teeth, you’re following a principle subconsciously. In this case, the overriding principle might be that the health of your body is a priority. And this principle may inform other decisions in your life, such as going to the gym, or passing on the free donuts.
Principles help govern and simplify all these daily micro-decisions. And at a societal level, when principles are shared and agreed upon, they work to create harmony and shared purpose. It’s easy to find examples of shared principles in the world, whether they’re well-documented (“thou shalt not steal”) , or unsaid (“treat other people’s property with respect”). To be sure, these principles are why we’re not regularly beating each other with lead pipes.
Principles at Work
Back to your team at Bit+Bite. You desperately need to stop wasting time arguing and make some decisions. Principles can help.
But now that you know you need principles, how exactly how do you create them? Where do they come from?
It’s helpful to think of a principle as a representation of a debate, which prevents that debate from happening again. It’s a proxy. You’ll know you need principles when you start to have the same debates over, and over.
Simply agreeing on a principle is not enough. An effective principle is one that that you could well imagine someone arguing against.
For example, “Make it useable” is not a good design principle because it’s obvious and you can’t really dispute it.
“Prioritize simplicy over complexity at all costs” is a better principle because the decision may not always be so clear cut otherwise. You may argue that certain users of a product require complexity. An austere car dashboard, hiding all the complex controls under a beautiful UI, will not suit airline pilots who need finely-tuned control at their fingertips.
Therefore, agreeing on effective principles means viewing your debates not as infuriating diversions but as the groundwork for simpler decision-making in the future.
“You’ll know you need principles when you start to have the same debates over and over.”
Finally, with principles in place, Bit+Bite can critique their new design through the lens of shared understanding. Stephen will concede that the full-screen menu shouldn’t be used because it conflicts with the principle of keeping the user in context at all times. And Sarah, thankfully, may have to put her badger dreams on hold due to the principle of “No badgers, ever”.
Then, miraculously, there’s consensus and a path forward. A decision has been made, personal opinions have been shelved, and the meeting ends with fewer tears and time to spare.
So next time your team is stuck in endless debate, and before you heave your laptop out the window and call it quits, consider the one principle of design principles:
Agree on, and abide by, your shared principles.
