Informing Redesign from Design Principles

Design Principles are foundational values that help frame design decisions. When facing an increasing amount of complex clinical data and new partnerships, my design team struggled to just “squeeze” new content and features onto the existing frame.

Through some fun workshops and cross-functional feedback sessions, we established clear values to guide our design decisions for the new era.

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My responsibilities

• Spearheading the effort to create Design Principles with the designers on my team via interactive workshops.

• Building alignment with cross-functional stakeholders, showing the value of this exercise, and coaching them on how to critique design with these design principles.

• Guiding, critiquing, suggesting new design patterns, to eventually signing off on all design decisions throughout this process.

Challenges

Stakeholders on my team were not familiar with the idea of design principles. Getting their buy-in required lots of 1:1 sessions and an effective demonstration of value. More importantly, as the tool became more complex, they had yet to flex the muscle to make tough trade-off decisions. On the other hand, my design team was feeling overwhelmed with the flood of new requests from partnerships and multiple feature backlogs. While they had varying degrees of familiarity with Design Principles, they questioned the ROI of such time investment during crunch time. However, I saw the expanded team struggle to collaborate with one another; we were accumulating product design debt with each subpar feature addition. Something had to be done!