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I've read through Product Picnic's latest post and felt compelled to repost it even before I read the other related links within the article because I think it's a good read to anyone who works on UX within their own teams. It's been a while since I've seen any “design principles” communicated within teams I've worked with to help guide us through how we should make design decisions, and I do know it's even more rare to see these exercised in the way they should be.

I want to highlight this particular statement in the article about why design principles are the way they are: “it’s when we must decide between two good things that the creative constraints of a design principle are most necessary.”

There would have been so many things that could have been "easier" to decide on in hindsight if we had design principles defined beforehand. And if these don't exist yet and we needed a source where to define this, every decision a team who has worked together that followed a certain theme could be interpreted as a design principle that can help carry on the idea even if the people crafting solutions changed. What ends up happening instead is as soon as a key person goes away, usually through resigning or sometimes when they're promoted or moved to another team, the cadence of those remaining changes. Until someone forms an opinion again, the feeling would have been like a ship without a captain who knows where to steer the vessel.

(I usually wanna just share an article once I've at least skimmed through all the related links. But maybe I'll hold off on that idea now. If all else fails, I can just make a post on my own, linking back to this.)

First shared this post on LinkedIn.