Design Language

Why Create a Design Language?

A design language represents a shared set of beliefs and understanding in creating better experiences. This guideline establishes the shared principles and practices we follow to consistently create better digital products for our clients.

Design Principles

These five principles will help you design better experiences by thinking of humans and human needs as the central focus point.

Design For Human Limitations

Limited Attention

Give people what they need when they need it.
Show only the most important information as default.
Use progressive disclosure to keep a person’s limited attention on track. 
Don't make various pieces of your design compete for the user's attention.

Limited Memory

Keep chunks of information to 3-4 items at a time to design to limited memory capacity
Help users with reminders of where they are and the decisions they have made

Decision Making

Guide your user and don't force too many decisions at once. 

Provide concise, consistent, and clear messages.

  • Is the information easy to scan?
  • Can you tell what’s going on within a couple of seconds?

Design For Better

Perfect is the Enemy of Good

Don’t let perfection get in your way
What do they have now?
Determine where the bar for quality is and remember that you are designing to make things better
Conduct usability testing
Gradually introduce change and improvements
Iterate your designs

Design For Understanding

Language

  • What is the language of the user?
  • Does the person understand industry jargon?
  • Does the person understand acronyms?

Familiarity

Make your design decisions obvious

  • Does it look like a navigation?
  • Does it look like a call to action?
  • Do your icons make things easier to recognize quickly?

Design Patterns

Design for Most Advanced Yet Acceptable (MAYA)
What design patterns are users familiar with?
Use what your users know and understand
Learnability, familiarity, practicality

Design Intentionally

Solve the Real Problems

Design features that solve the most important problems first
Does this design element solve a real, identified problem?
Can you explain why a design element is important?
Does the feature really need to be included?

Direct User Attention

Design for meaning in patterns, use of color, and use of typography
Use design to draw attention to the right places
Attention grabbing design elements in descending order: Size, Color, Layout, Spacing, Style
Brightly contrasting colors draw attention. Use sparingly.
Size and weight of typography help draw attention

Design for Efficiency

Don’t Make People Work Harder

The body and mind are wired for the path of least resistance
Remove barriers and steps whenever possible
Put users through the least amount of work possible
Use smart defaults to make things easier
-What should the default settings be?
-Where should the cursor be placed?
-What should be shown and what should be hidden?
Lay out the content in a way that is easy to scan with an F-shape scan pattern in mind

Putting Design to Practice

These practice recommendations will help you design better experiences.

Plan Ahead

Plan Before You Create or Research

What and when are your checkpoints?
-What can you do between now and then to make the biggest, positive impact?
-How will you show progress?

Solve the Right Problems

Balance User vs Stakeholder Needs

Business requirements

  • Who are your business stakeholders?
  • What do your business stakeholders want?
  • What drives your business stakeholder needs?

How are you going to prioritize conflicting business stakeholder needs vs user need?
Question corporate folklore

  • Why are things done a certain way?
  • Is there truth to processes and policies or is it just hearsay?

Spend the time to do discovery well.

Use Data to Inform Your Decisions and Hypotheses

Data Informed Design

Use the scientific method and set your hypothesis
What data do you need to inform your decisions?
What information can you get now?
What could you do to get more data soon?
What could you do to get more data in the future?

  • What content is available?
  • What metrics are available?
  • What does a content audit tell you about the product and its users?

Large sets of data

  • What is the most important data?
  • What can you do with a smaller set of the large data?

Help People Get Through Mistakes and Errors

Mistakes Happen

Take the blame off the user
Make it easy to undo accidents
Prevent errors from occurring at all
Break up multiple steps into simple, single steps if necessary
Don’t make people to remember anything

Stop Reinventing the Wheel

Reuse and Recyle

Inventory or create a design pattern library
Reuse components as much as possible

Share Your Knowledge

Educate Others

Create and document policies, procedures and guidelines

Establish a central location for your library where everyone can find your resources