Design Principles Examples: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

While we already wrote out some handy tips for writing your design principles, we’re practicing what we preach by adding context, and listing out some good and bad (fictional) design principles.

The Good Ones

Pinterest

UNBREAKABLE

It’s built for exploration

Just like a children’s toy, you want to try it out just to see what will happen. The more you investigate, the faster you learn and the more you get in return.

It’s impossible to mis-tap

Everything is designed to help you navigate easily and do exactly what you had in mind.

It’s reversible

If you accidentally do something that doesn’t produce the results you were looking for, it’s obvious how to correct it.

One of Pinterest’s three principles (broken down into three additional principles) is ‘Unbreakable’. This guides the designers in how they might go about designing a solution and how they would present that to the user. It also helps provide a clear set of acceptance criteria when judging whether an interface is successful or not. Can a user figure out what it is they need to do by exploration alone? Are there any gotchas that cause a user to break the interface? If they do something that was unexpected, are they able to undo the action easily?

In my mind, this provides both guardrails for how to approach a solution, as well as a strong set of criteria to check against when critiquing or testing a solution.

Wonderbly

Grandma First

Our customers are not just tech savvy urban mums but also digitally novice grandparents. We must deliver a simple, effective, and rewarding customer experiences for every type of customer. Helping people to make the right decisions and guiding them along the path to purchase wherever needed.

While I’ll ignore the slightly ageist tone of this particular principle, it’s a really nice summation of having your core users front and centre when designing. Wonderbly know that a large segment of their userbase are less technically-proficient folks, so they need to make sure that their products are usable by this specific persona. A large part of this will also speak to how they onboard and signpost features and journeys to users, and put instilling trust front and centre in their designs. Similar to the Pinterest principle above, it also provides a clear lens with which to critique and test against before shipping a solution.

Firefox

Whimsical

Firefox products are fun to use! Our products delight the user in both expected and unexpected ways.

Firefox’s whimsical principle is a good example of bringing a brand differentiator into the product design principles. This is Firefox defining what it is that they aren’t, as the norm within the browser space is to have a minimal, sleek and plain interface, so designers may expect that that’s what Firefox would also be trying to achieve. Instead, they identify how they’re different, and what the designs should be aiming to make the user’s think about Firefox and how they should feel.

The Bad Ones

And what about the bad ones? Instead of calling out design principles I don’t agree with (and don’t have the full context for), I made up some common ones that I think don’t work as well…

A common design principle is around making it so your product is easy to use. While this may make sense, as it’s something that we should all be trying to achieve, the universality of this feels like it’s wasting air. Instead, if you really feel that folks don’t understand what good design is, why not link off to a set of universal design principles like Dieter Rams’ 10 Principles.

Another common one is to be ambiguous in your language and make huge assumptions that the person reading it will know what you mean. This is similar to design feedback like ‘can you make it pop?‘ in that the meaning is so ambiguous that it can be interpreted a million different ways, and relies on a whole load of implied knowledge. So, no, ‘make [insert company name] feel like [insert company name]’ is not an effective design principle.

Want some inspiration?

If you’re embarking on the quest to create some great design principles, it may not make sense to reinvent the wheel. You can find loads of articles diving into other company’s design principles (like this great one from Muzli), and there are a couple of good open source collections like Design Principles FTW and Design Principles.