22 August 2014

Asana's Design Principles

These are the aligning principles for Asana - a product that enables teamwork without email.

Stephanie Hornung, who used to be a UX designer at Asana, published an interesting article on Medium where she explains why and how they developed these principles. A great read to get the background as well as insights in one way of creating design principles for a product.

Also check out Developing our design principles on the Asana blog.

Source: Aligning your team through design principles on Medium.com


The principles

  1. Allow users to focus on their work without interference.

    A user’s focus should be in their control, only distract users with changes that are personally relevant.

  2. Increase confidence through clarity.

    Within the application, and more broadly within teams, it is unambiguous what is happening and why.

  3. Foster productive and emotionally satisfying interpersonal dynamics.

    Users feel like they are part of a team, where they can count on each other to do their part, and feel like they’re moving forward towards a common goal.

  4. Design for fast, effortless, and intentional interactions.

    Simple and common tasks should be frictionless and obvious; complex tasks should feel efficient and delightful. But, speed should not lead to inaccuracies.

  5. Empower everyone through progressive discoverability.

    Everyone at all levels of experience with Asana should feel like they know how to use the product, regardless of how many features they use.

  6. Be consistent and standard, and innovate when it’s worth it.

    Users should feel like Asana is familiar, yet modern.

1. Allow users to focus on their work without interference.

A user’s focus should be in their control, only distract users with changes that are personally relevant.

2. Increase confidence through clarity.

Within the application, and more broadly within teams, it is unambiguous what is happening and why.

3. Foster productive and emotionally satisfying interpersonal dynamics.

Users feel like they are part of a team, where they can count on each other to do their part, and feel like they’re moving forward towards a common goal.

4. Design for fast, effortless, and intentional interactions.

Simple and common tasks should be frictionless and obvious; complex tasks should feel efficient and delightful. But, speed should not lead to inaccuracies.

5. Empower everyone through progressive discoverability.

Everyone at all levels of experience with Asana should feel like they know how to use the product, regardless of how many features they use.

6. Be consistent and standard, and innovate when it’s worth it.

Users should feel like Asana is familiar, yet modern.

Tags

  • Product Design
  • UX

Related collections

Ten principles for good design

10 principles


Dieter Rams

Don Normans Principles of Design

6 principles


Don Norman

Shneiderman's "Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design"

8 principles


Ben Shneiderman

20 Guiding Principles for Experience Design

20 principles


Whitney Hess

Design principles for reducing cognitive load

7 principles


Jon Yablonski