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Why design principles shape stronger products
Our design team didn’t have any design principles and it was difficult to determine design success.
My job is to design and improve/redesign a legacy CRM system for real estate professionals. We often ran into design limitations because we didn’t have any principles to refer to. Our users have a love/hate relationship with the product. Some users think it’s a great lead generation tool that boosts their business and helps to manage their contacts. Some of them think it’s cumbersome, time-consuming to complete tasks, buggy and not user-friendly. There is so much to improve, but what are the restrictions?
New features vs. existing problems
We collaborate with our user research team to conduct user testing/interviews. It varies from testing existing features to redesigning a prototype. We gather user feedback and categorize them to define or confirm usability issues. We go through the cycle of user testing, design, and iterate. Yet, while we working hard improving the product, new features are often requested. This can be frustrating, especially on a page that already has usability issues. The more functions you add, the more complex it becomes.
Legacy design patterns
At work, we have our legacy design patterns. Thus, new designs are always tied into consistency. In theory, consistency is necessary because we don’t want to detract from what users are doing. Though at the same time, we want to move fast and reduce task clicks. But then we would have to sacrifice consistency. What should we do? How should we rank consistency and efficiency? Which is more important?
User needs vs. Design needs
Through user testing, we learned that user needs often don’t match design needs. Admit it, don’t we all have the tendency to design based on our hypothesis? We think we understand the user flow without further user research. The truth is that we aren’t always right. The lessons impart a human-oriented sense of “why?”. Why don’t users just get it? Why can’t they find such an obvious button? Why wouldn’t they want to use a function that we think is useful? Why don’t they like the existing features? So many why that confuses us.
