Design Principles
2020-2021
Our websites and apps across products and businesses don’t look like they all belong to the same brand. Product owners ask designers to make their product stand out and be unique, and the designers have little power to convince them otherwise. There is no governance in the new agile way of working and products are straying from the brand standards. Many products are creating ‘sub-brands’ with individual apps that are not tied to the flagship app. There is also little to no sharing of tech stacks so many teams are tackling the same problems and building similar solutions.
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A single set of design principles used in conjunction with a single design system and tone and brand guidelines will align our products visually and teams will begin to use shared underlying technology.
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Content strategy lead. Ensured content was considered in all design principles, that they were written in a clear and concise manner, and that all content was aligned with our style guide.
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With big change, comes lots of uncertainty and discomfort. We had senior executive support, which helped, but there was a lot of disruption to the way teams were working. We had to:
Convince designers they were not losing the ability to be creative and product owners they were still going to be able to differentiate their product
Get all product teams to use system thinking and stop building one-off solutions
Keep teams at bay while we finished building the principles and were able to effectively train people and roll it out.
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We created weekly training sessions for everyone in the enterprise to attend. Each week, we reviewed 2 principles and shared examples of how to use the principle. We recorded them so people could view them on demand. As part of the training, we rolled out a website that outlined each of the principles and set up office hours so people could get help.
