INNOVATING DESIGN PRACTICE

Design [_____]?

How design thinking, design goals, design principles, design heuristics, design language, design patterns, design systems, and design execution relate. Oh my!

What is the difference? Why does it matter? When does it matter? Where do I use them? Who cares?

Design Thinking

Design Thinking is a process that any team can use to come up with innovations for their business, product, or process. Conceived in the early 1960s, popularized in the 1990s, and “diluted” in the 2000s design thinking is a tool that businesses use when they want their company or team to be more “innovative.” [1]

Design Thinking provides a framework for innovation. Often teams do not have tools for finding and evaluating new opportunities. Design Thinking offers a process that teams can follow to explore and develop new directions.

Design Thinking can be used for strategic direction within an organization or down to teams finding direction within a project. The important thing about doing a design thinking exercise is to scale the time appropriately to the needs of the research and development needed to attain a meaningful result.

The rest of these Design [WORD] phrases are design-team specific but essential to design teams’ ability to be effective with other teams. Defining and promoting the following tools minimizes personal subjectivity and focuses conversations on what an organization considers meaningful.

Design goals, principles, and heuristics tend to exist on a continuum and are used interchangeably by some. This article provides a point of view for differentiating them.

Design Goals

Design Goals are statements a team makes about the quality of experience they would like a product to attain.

Design goals are targets for design work. — [John Spacey 2018]

Design Goals are meant to be reached (blue target), some with more effort than others (line length).

Design Goals are used to make decisions when choosing among design options. Take efficient as a design goal. If three options are designed for a feature, the option that lets the user finish in fewer steps should be chosen over one that may be easier to learn.

When the team sets the goals, they should also set metrics for measuring whether the goal has been reached. They can either set quantitative goals like “User will be able to complete task 10% faster,” or qualitative goals like, “User feels the task is faster to accomplish.”

Design Principles

Design Principles are words or statements that set direction. Like design goals, they point to an expected result, but there isn’t an expectation of being reached. They are directionally correct but may never be reached.

Design Principles have a priority (order) and take differing effort (length) to reach the goal (right side | circle).

Design principles are also used to make decisions. Depending on the priority of the principles, the team will pick the design that meets the most principles in the order of priority. As the arrows in the diagram indicate, some design principles take more effort (longer lines), and some are less important (not reaching the goal).

Design Principles have a continuum between table stakes like useful, usable, and consistent and those that drive differentiation or innovation, like trustworthy, approachable, or cinematic.

Sometimes priority will shift depending on the context of the feature. If a project had efficiency, trustworthy, and delightful as the design principles, prioritized in that order, you might apply them differently between login (+trustworthy) and the primary experience (+efficiency).

Design Heuristics

Where design goals and principles point to a specific outcome, design heuristics are strategies or “rules of thumb.” They articulate a general way to approach design.

Design Heuristics as a form of intermediate-level knowledge that may explain how designers build on existing knowledge of “design moves” — non-deterministic, generative strategies or heuristics — during conceptual design activity. [Gray 2016]

Often design heuristics are statements used to specify how to accomplish design principles or design goals (the design moves) — bold statement below.

Trustworthy — be transparent about how the product calculates results.

Design Heuristics point in a direction, often supporting design goals or principles.

There is some confusion between usability heuristics and design heuristics. Design heuristics are applied while creating the product. Usability heuristics are used to assess the product to see if it meets specific goals. The best-known usability heuristics are from Neilsen/Norman [5]. They cover particular issues.

Design Language

Design Language is the combination of Design Heuristics (black) uniquely defining Design Goals and/or Principles (gray arrows) that embodies an overall design philosophy (larger arrow).

A Design Language is a set of precepts or general rules — usually formed out of Design Principles and characterized by Design Heuristics — that describe how you make decisions when designing a system. The priority of which guides teams on visual and interaction style choices. The strongest examples of these, such as Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, Google’s Material Design, and IBM’s Design Language describe a company’s overall design philosophy as design principles, as well as how to apply them.