The principles behind Bulb’s design — Making Bulb — Medium
Having opinionated principles can set you apart from competitors because they make you different. Everyone wants to design “usable” products, but a principle shouldn’t have a negative opposite — unusable, in this case.
Let’s test that: To test if your principles are genuine, show the evidence. Can you point to specific design patterns that embody “bold” or “tactile” or “human”? Do those qualities come up in user research, in customer feedback? It’s not enough to make principles sound good. They have to be true.
Let’s test that: To test your principles, try reversing them. Can you imagine an opposite quality working for another company? If the reverse is clearly negative (such as “usable — unusable” or “useful — useless”), a principle might be too safe and obvious to be useful.
This could also be applied to test brand tonality. F.ex, what is the opposite of “playful”, “informal”.
What makes effective principles
Good principles are genuine
Good principles have a point of view
Good principles are memorable
Let’s test that: To test your principles think about how they will be used every day. How will they sound in design critiques and in everyday conversations? Will everyone be able to remember them?
Simple design for Bulb often means simple binary choices, even if it means more clicks.
Sometimes we notice that a principle doesn’t quite work. For example, the “personal” principle used to be “Fun, not formal” originally. But then we learned that our users don’t always appreciate Bulb being “fun”. Nobody wants a “fun” message about their payment statement.
This helped us realise that Bulb design should instead priotize being personal and showing empathy for our members. Fun evolved into personal.
Good insight — a) account for the face that you don’t know the user’s mindset or mental state when they’re using your product, and b) know that “fun” is not always appropriate (cf FB highlights video featuring family members that passed away during the year)
Design principles are of course never done. In the future it would be interesting to see how our UX team evolved, by looking back at how our principles changed over time.
Posted on September 9, 2018