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Design Principles	/design	unique

Design is a long education in how to critically think about a problem.

Disavow yourself of the notion the design is solely or even primarily about aesthetics. Design is fundamentally about problem solving. While aesthetics can play a role in design, it is often much less important than most people think.

Encourage minorities, people of different beliefs, religion, origins or sexual orientation to participate because everyone should have a voice. Everyone’s voice is worthy of contribution. Do not discriminate.

Never allow your tools to dominate the message. Great design is when all those things take a backseat and you get the message.

When we build, we often focus on the moment of consumption which is a good starting point. Good experience design however, is so much more than that, it carries onto the moment before, during and after as well as everything in between. Build up a crescendo, take time to tell the story. Be it physical, verbal and digital you need to be able to create a coherent experience. Own the entire journey.

Share and solicit constant, systemic, unequivocal feedback early and often.

When we assume we’re inserting bias into our thought process, and we need to outsmart our own bias because we all have different experiences, needs, motivations and behaviors.

Design with context. Always ask yourself ‘What else is on their plate?’. Keep in mind that your product can be used on a bus in a rainy day, in the dark, after a heated argument. Consider the environment and anticipate how you can make sure that you’ve designed a frictionless experience.

If there are already products that have leveraged industry-standard interaction patterns with which users are familiar with, then make sure you make use of those patterns. Don’t create a whole new paradigm for how to interact with a model.

Design is all about mileage. The more you practice, the better you’ll get. The more you hone your intuition, the faster you make decisions and the less likely you’ll be to make mistakes.

You want to distance your product from others and unify the experience through different touchpoints, operating systems, and screens.

Immerse yourself in the problem space, fall in love with the problem itself. If you do this, then you will enable background processing to happen. This basically means the problem becomes so prevalent that it becomes omnipresent in your daily life. When it starts to sink in and turn around in your head for a while that’s when you begin to make unexpected connections.

Document your findings and process, it helps have a shared understanding of the common goal and the problem that the team is working towards.

In a team, when something goes wrong, the first instinct is to assign blame. Don’t sink to that level. Go back, identify and understand the problem, devise a plan to rectify it, implement it, review whether it was successful all while doing this by collaborating to solve it together not siloing yourself.

Turning a profit shouldn’t be the end goal, the bottom line. If the company really thinks about its customer’s experience, the journey they go through monetary gains are just another goal amongst the many other goals.

We need evidence-based design because what we are doing first and foremost is designing for people. We can’t assume for people because we can’t know them by placing them in a sample that we can cater for. It doesn’t matter that we do tonnes of research and get stakeholder buy-in and meet the client requirements and all that. It matters that we have sufficient evidence to support our choices and decisions, however we get that evidence.

Everything we build should be as inclusive, legible and readable as possible. If we have to sacrifice elegance — so be it. We’re building for needs, not audiences.

Be subversive and break down complexity and power structures holding that complexity together in order to design for the people not the organization. There needs to be a breakdown of socio-economic structures to really understand the root-cause of a problem.

Show the struggle, the process, the journey that you’ve taken to embolden people on your path to whatever problem that you’re solving.

Ethics should be part of the usability heuristics, because the things we make matter.

Our design decisions should be imbued with meaning and thought, they have to be based on rationale both objective and subjective, a healthy balance of the two.

Go broad, apply your toolkit to different kinds of problems, as that will inform your thought process when coming up with a design solution.

Shift sensory inputs into any direction if people change their physical environment they change patterns of thinking.

Encourage respectful and open debate because it takes a village to make a great product.

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design.md

design.md

Design is a long education in how to critically think about a problem.

Disavow yourself of the notion the design is solely or even primarily about aesthetics. Design is fundamentally about problem solving. While aesthetics can play a role in design, it is often much less important than most people think.

Encourage minorities, people of different beliefs, religion, origins or sexual orientation to participate because everyone should have a voice. Everyone’s voice is worthy of contribution. Do not discriminate.

Never allow your tools to dominate the message. Great design is when all those things take a backseat and you get the message.

Share and solicit constant, systemic, unequivocal feedback early and often.

When we assume we’re inserting bias into our thought process, and we need to outsmart our own bias because we all have different experiences, needs, motivations and behaviors.

Design with context. Always ask yourself ‘What else is on their plate?’. Keep in mind that your product can be used on a bus in a rainy day, in the dark, after a heated argument. Consider the environment and anticipate how you can make sure that you’ve designed a frictionless experience.

If there are already products that have leveraged industry-standard interaction patterns with which users are familiar with, then make sure you make use of those patterns. Don’t create a whole new paradigm for how to interact with a model.

Design is all about mileage. The more you practice, the better you’ll get. The more you hone your intuition, the faster you make decisions and the less likely you’ll be to make mistakes.

You want to distance your product from others and unify the experience through different touchpoints, operating systems, and screens.

Document your findings and process, it helps have a shared understanding of the common goal and the problem that the team is working towards.

Turning a profit shouldn’t be the end goal, the bottom line. If the company really thinks about its customer’s experience, the journey they go through monetary gains are just another goal amongst the many other goals.

Everything we build should be as inclusive, legible and readable as possible. If we have to sacrifice elegance — so be it. We’re building for needs, not audiences.

Be subversive and break down complexity and power structures holding that complexity together in order to design for the people not the organization. There needs to be a breakdown of socio-economic structures to really understand the root-cause of a problem.

Show the struggle, the process, the journey that you’ve taken to embolden people on your path to whatever problem that you’re solving.

Ethics should be part of the usability heuristics, because the things we make matter.

Our design decisions should be imbued with meaning and thought, they have to be based on rationale both objective and subjective, a healthy balance of the two.

Go broad, apply your toolkit to different kinds of problems, as that will inform your thought process when coming up with a design solution.

Shift sensory inputs into any direction if people change their physical environment they change patterns of thinking.

Encourage respectful and open debate because it takes a village to make a great product.

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Design is a long education in how to critically think about a problem.

Disavow yourself of the notion the design is solely or even primarily about aesthetics. Design is fundamentally about problem solving. While aesthetics can play a role in design, it is often much less important than most people think.

Encourage minorities, people of different beliefs, religion, origins or sexual orientation to participate because everyone should have a voice. Everyone’s voice is worthy of contribution. Do not discriminate.

Never allow your tools to dominate the message. Great design is when all those things take a backseat and you get the message.

Share and solicit constant, systemic, unequivocal feedback early and often.

When we assume we’re inserting bias into our thought process, and we need to outsmart our own bias because we all have different experiences, needs, motivations and behaviors.

Design with context. Always ask yourself ‘What else is on their plate?’. Keep in mind that your product can be used on a bus in a rainy day, in the dark, after a heated argument. Consider the environment and anticipate how you can make sure that you’ve designed a frictionless experience.

If there are already products that have leveraged industry-standard interaction patterns with which users are familiar with, then make sure you make use of those patterns. Don’t create a whole new paradigm for how to interact with a model.

Design is all about mileage. The more you practice, the better you’ll get. The more you hone your intuition, the faster you make decisions and the less likely you’ll be to make mistakes.

You want to distance your product from others and unify the experience through different touchpoints, operating systems, and screens.

Document your findings and process, it helps have a shared understanding of the common goal and the problem that the team is working towards.

Turning a profit shouldn’t be the end goal, the bottom line. If the company really thinks about its customer’s experience, the journey they go through monetary gains are just another goal amongst the many other goals.

Everything we build should be as inclusive, legible and readable as possible. If we have to sacrifice elegance — so be it. We’re building for needs, not audiences.

Be subversive and break down complexity and power structures holding that complexity together in order to design for the people not the organization. There needs to be a breakdown of socio-economic structures to really understand the root-cause of a problem.

Show the struggle, the process, the journey that you’ve taken to embolden people on your path to whatever problem that you’re solving.

Ethics should be part of the usability heuristics, because the things we make matter.

Our design decisions should be imbued with meaning and thought, they have to be based on rationale both objective and subjective, a healthy balance of the two.

Go broad, apply your toolkit to different kinds of problems, as that will inform your thought process when coming up with a design solution.

Shift sensory inputs into any direction if people change their physical environment they change patterns of thinking.

Encourage respectful and open debate because it takes a village to make a great product.