Design principles are invaluable for aligning teams and organizations around shared values and aspirations. However, to have a real impact, they need broad acceptance within the organization. Everyone involved needs to understand, accept, and ideally feel ownership of them.

The way to do that is not by creating them in isolation, presenting them, and expecting everyone to think they are amazing and to start living by them. Doing that is a sure way to have a set of design principles that nobody cares about and that will just fade away and soon be forgotten entirely.

In my experience, the best way to create design principles that actually work is to create them collaboratively, involving all the people who impact the decision-making process and are involved in creating the product or service.

Align on goals and values

Design principles do not exist in isolation. They need to align with the goals and aspirations of the organization. They need to align with the overall vision, strategy, and the things that make a product or offering unique. Essentially, it needs to communicates the core values and beliefs of the organization. These are often not clearly expressed, and crafting design principles can be a great way of uncovering and articulating them.

That said, it's important to talk to several stakeholders to get a sense of what's important to them and how they view the unique values of the organization and its offerings. Also, read up on the documentation that currently exists on vision and strategy since they provide essential clues about what's important to encapsulate in the design principles.

Also, don't forget about your users. If you've done your research, you should have a good idea of who your users are and what their goals, aspirations, and pain points are. At the end of the day, your product should solve real user problems in a way they enjoy and appreciate. Your design principles should reflect the values that drive towards the ideal user experience.

Background and inspiration

Not everyone will know what design principles are and what value they bring to the table. Therefore, you need to communicate what they are and how they can be beneficial. This is essential to motivate people to put in the necessary work.

To get some ideas about describing the benefits, you can check out another article of mine, Design Principles Explained - What they are and why you should care.
It's also a good idea to look at some examples of what others have done. This will give a sense of what they actually are and may spark ideas on what your design principles could be.

Many organizations make their design principles public, and a great source of inspiration is this site, where you can find design principles from all over the world in an easy-to-find format.

Collaborative ideation

With all the groundwork being covered, it's time to start ideating ideas for design principles. I usually do this with a workshop technique called Affinity mapping.

The process follows the classic pattern of diverging and converging, meaning first creating lots of ideas and then narrowing them down to the most promising ones. The process essentially looks like this:

• Ask the participants to write down as many ideas on the core values of the product as possible on Post-it notes. Only one idea per post-it. Allow about 10 minutes for this.
• Ask the participants to put the notes on a wall or a large table individually and briefly explain each note's meaning.
• Collectively organize similar ideas into groups. Try to get everyone involved and discuss what ideas should belong to which group.
• Give each group a name that encapsulates the idea.
• Prioritize the ideas using a technique called Dot voting. Each participant gets a few sticky dots and is then asked to put them on the most promising ideas. They can put the dots however they like - distribute them evenly on several ideas or put several dots on one idea they think is especially promising.

After doing this exercise, you will have plenty of ideas for design principles. You will also have a sense of what ideas are conceived as the most promising. This makes it relatively easy to distill all these ideas into a set of design principles that build on the collective notion of what the core values of the product are.

During the workshop, some people will most likely confuse values with features, but don't worry too much about that. Behind the feature ideas, it is often possible to
find a core value or a spark of ideas for what's valuable in the offering.

Crafting the actual design principles

Having all the ideas from the workshop, it's now time to articulate these into solid design principles.

First of all, you don't want too many. I'll try to keep it to a maximum of 7, but fewer is also fine if that covers the most important aspects of the values you want to convey. Then, spend time articulating a good title for each design principle. The title needs to be memorable and capture the essence of the value.

Writing a short description of each design principle is also a good idea. One or two sentences are often enough. Remember, even though the design principles are created collaboratively there will eventually be people who haven't been involved in the process who will need to understand them too. Adding a bit of extra context can help with understanding them.

For more details on how to craft great Design Principles. Check out my article The Anatomy of a Design Principle where I go into great depth on the topic.

Reviewing the design principles

After creating your first draft, it's a good idea to gather the people involved in the process and present them. What you're looking for is, first of all, to communicate them and show how they build upon the collective work that you did earlier. Second, you want to get feedback so that you can refine and develop them further.

Involving the people in this step is important to gain acceptance and a sense of shared ownership. It will also make the design principles even more effective since you will get at least a few good pointers and suggestions.

Sharing and distributing

You now have a set of good, solid design principles. But they are of no use if they are not communicated and distributed. Remember! The goal is to have the design principles as an ingrained part of how you make decisions around the product.

First, you should present the final design principles in an internal forum, maybe at a weekly or monthly meeting where many people participate. You should also distribute them via your internal communication systems, whether an Intranet, Teams, or Slack.

For more long-term distribution, a Wiki is a good place to start. There, people can easily find them, the drawback being that they have to do so actively.

In my work, I've created posters of the design principles and hung them in strategic places so that they are visible and people can't help but see them. You can also make a small pamphlet that each of your colleges can have available at their desk for easy reference.

Many organizations also opt to publish their design principles publicly on their websites. After all, they represent the organization's core values and can, therefore, be valuable for external distribution.

When onboarding new team members, you should also include a session where you describe the design principles and explain why they are important and how they guide the decision-making process.

Maintaining and evolving

The world is constantly changing, and so are organizations and products. This means that your design principles also need to evolve over time. Your organization's focus might change, and new technologies might emerge, allowing you to create new types of experiences.

This means you periodically need to check if your design principles are still relevant. Gather your team and stakeholders and assess whether the design principles are still doing their job. Ask questions about priorities: Are they still aligned with the product's goals? Do designers still find them valuable when designing new solutions?

When design principles are changed, make sure that this is documented and communicated to all involved parties. Explain the reasoning behind the changes to ensure that everybody is on the same page.

In closing

Design principles can be a valuable tool for aligning people on common values, which makes for smoother decision-making and less ambiguity. But for them to have a real impact, you need buy-in from the people involved. To ensure this, a collaborative approach is vital. That's the only way you'll ever make people understand and use them consistently.

I hope this article has convinced you of the benefits of this approach and inspired you to take a shot at this in your organization.