Is the time and effort invested in defining design principles worth it—especially when it might feel like self-indulgent make-work? Can a relatively new but growing design team find a shared purpose and principles that work for every team member? Do design principles even make sense for a consultancy whose product design work changes client to client?
We weren't certain of the answers to these quandaries when we started, but defining TXI's design principles helped unify and crystallize who we want to be as designers and teammates. This outcome feels like a resounding 'yes' to us.
With a new practice lead and two-thirds of the team with a tenure of a year or less, we didn’t have the kind of history that serves as design shorthand. Without a common compass guiding us, every choice had to be checked as we went. This added time to projects and muddied our process. A set of principles started to seem like a smart investment and a pragmatic way to rely less on guesswork or gut instinct.
Searching for our starting point
While the best design work is rooted in user research, there’s always a subjective space between what the research says and how we as designers interpret and translate it. That distance, however small, can be incredibly hard to articulate to clients and colleagues outside the design team. And without principles, it's just as hard to do between designers—especially on teams where the strongest wills and most impassioned perspectives prevail. Thankfully we're a pretty empathic and inclusive team, so what we really needed was something to bring us together: a lightweight check and balance assuring us at each decision point we were heading down the "right" path. We do "great" work as individuals, but how could we know for sure if it was great work for TXI as a design organization?
Part of the problem we faced was figuring out what "right" or "great" even meant for TXI—especially when design manifests so differently client to client and product to product. What works for a food innovator like Tyson looks completely different than what works for a news service like Accuweather. Design principles are typically tied to a product, not the in-house team building it. So at first we wondered if design principles could even work in an agency, where the clients, industries, and audiences are so varied. With some research, we found evidence (and inspiration) in great design principles set by other agencies, many of which are aggregated at websites like Design Principles.
With plenty of possibilities and proof to build from, we committed as a design team to define our own guiding principles; but we knew we'd need some outside facilitation to help guide the effort.
Pro Tip: Defining representative design principles is a group effort. Without everyone’s input and involvement, you're likely to end up with a set of easily-abandoned aphorisms that never really take root. Be clear about what's driving the need for your principles as well as your intentions and expectations for them once they're defined.
Creating connections and cohesion
It wasn’t intended as a team-building exercise, but defining our design principles uncovered many beliefs we didn't know we shared and unified our team with new understanding and appreciation for each other. This was made possible, in large part, by our guest facilitator, Valerie Craig.
Structured as a virtual work session in Mural during our day-long offsite, our facilitator led us through a number of exercises, exploring our individual rationales behind a shortlist of principles we each brought to share.
