Set the Standard: Why Every UX Team Needs Design Principles

UX Insights - User Experience Leadership and Strategy

Ever notice how every other department has policies and procedures, but UX rarely does?

There are rules for procurement. Rules for budgets. Rules for installing software. Even rules for when you’re allowed to eat fish at your desk (I wish I was joking). But ask someone for the rules around UX, and you’ll probably get a blank look.

The difference? Most teams have taken the time to write theirs down. We haven’t.

That’s what we’re going to fix.

We’ll start with one of the most accessible and impactful types of UX guidance you can create: design principles.

What Are Design Principles, Really?

Design principles are a set of high-level guidelines to help your organization make consistent, user-centered decisions. They provide a north star for teams as they navigate the thousand tiny choices that shape your user experience - from interface copy to onboarding flows.

Done right, they:

• Keep people focused on what matters most
• Ensure UX is considered across the board, not just by your team
• Help settle disagreements without calling in the UX police

In short, they make your life easier and your users’ experience better.

Why You Can’t Just Make Them Up

You may have heard about design principles before. You may have even created your own. However, if you don't create them in the right way, they will rarely succeed.

This is because if you try to create them in a vacuum, nobody will follow them.

It’s not enough to draft a list of nice-sounding statements and post them on the wiki. People will (rightly) wonder where they came from and why they should care. You need to build buy-in from the start.

A Simple Way to Create Design Principles That Stick

Here’s the process I use with clients:

1. Start with inspiration

Go to principles.design and collect around 30 existing principles that could work for your organization. Choose ones that reflect the values you want to promote, and that you’d personally stand behind.

2. Involve stakeholders early

Share this shortlist with a broad group of colleagues. Ask them to vote on the principles that resonate most. This gives them a voice in the process and gives your final list credibility.

Note that because you pre-selected principles that could work for your organization, you prevent stakeholders from choosing inappropriate options while still giving them meaningful input.

3. Narrow it down

You don't need 30 principles. Nobody will remember them. Based on the stakeholder voting, narrow down to the 6 to 10 most popular options. This gives you enough to provide structure, not so many that they become white noise.

4. Share and promote

Once you've finalized your principles, don't just email them out and move on. Introduce them in team meetings. Refer to them in design critiques. Use them as criteria in design reviews. Make them part of how work gets done.

Later in this email course, we'll come on to look at marketing and promoting the work that you do internally within the organization, and that will include more on how to use design principles.

Outie’s Aside

If you’re a freelancer or agency owner, design principles are still worth having, just framed a bit differently. They can be a powerful way to:

• Show clients what you stand for and how you work
• Guide internal consistency across your projects
• Create a shared language when collaborating with partners

You might even consider turning your principles into a short onboarding doc for new clients. It sets expectations early and helps position you as a strategic partner, not just a pixel pusher.

The Bigger Picture

Design principles are powerful, but they’re just the start. If we want UX to be taken seriously across the organization, we need more than good intentions; we need policy. That’s what we’ll explore in the next email: how to create lightweight, flexible UX policies that help guide work without grinding things to a halt.

Until then, have a think:

What’s one design decision your team has debated recently that a shared principle could’ve resolved?