Design operations guide

To set expectations on what they’ll accomplish together, design teams must create project-level principles at the outset of the design phase. These principles act as the team’s compass throughout a project’s development. They are tactical, immediate, and reflect an organization’s strategy and mission, perhaps articulated through a set of global design principles, but in a focused and outcome-oriented way. 

Design principles help set project intentions, aligning everyone to a shared project direction. These principles are not tactical goals, but are instead a continual reference for the team to guide design direction while integrating participant feedback. In evaluating a project’s success, these principles can be used to track how the project outcomes map to original intentions. Similar to the discovery phase, if participant feedback indicates that the team’s direction does not serve participant needs, you must refocus and restart the design phase, including creating principles.

This guide will focus on project-level, rather than global, design principles. Global design principles are typically used in large-scale complex initiatives. Because they are communicated to a wide range of stakeholders to guide collaborations across multiple projects, global design principles can take months, and sometimes even years, of skilled design facilitation to develop.  Learn more about global design principles in the HCD Design Concepts Guide.

Why create project-level principles?

Project-level principles answer why the team is undertaking a design phase. They define the design space. For example, in creating this HCD Guides series, we created several principles that draw boundaries and create context for the work. Some of the principles we created are:

1. Audience: Our audience are mid-level management to senior leaders leading generative (not reductive or evaluative) projects and who have some support from professional designers.
2. Logic: Maintaining consistently scaled logic across the series is paramount. No glib exhortations to “Practice empathy!” in one line and in the next line reminding the reader to bring Sharpies. We will unpack complicated terms like empathy through plain language and engaging graphics.
3. Visual Communication: If we had time to make these guides graphic novels, we would. Every place we could possibly show instead of tell, we would do that work.

These principles, among others, helped us stay inside a defined space as we created these guides. Without writing down boundaries for your project in the form of design principles, it’s easy to get lost in the flow of a project. Principles keep you focused on creating solutions that are most important to your participants, and that are inside the opportunity spaces you identified back in your discovery phase.

How to create principles

To create design principles, step back from the tactical demands of your project. This activity is high-level thinking. These principles should define the kind of preferred outcome you’re working towards, rather than the details of what you shape to get there. Follow these steps to create and use project-level principles:

1. Reflect on your key insights (the ones that you’ve determined must be addressed in any design solution).
2. Craft principles that articulate the values you bring to your innovation practice as you shape a preferred condition. (A helpful prompt is to ask yourself, what do these opportunities tell us about a new approach that might be taken? What kind of experience is most important to the people who will be interacting with this? What ideas would be embodied in an ideal scenario?)
3. State the intent of these principles. What do you imagine will happen if they are applied? This helps ground your design concepts with intention so that iterations of your idea can be tested in relation to your intent.
4. As you move through the ideation phase (coming next!) and your iteration phases (two steps away!), evaluate your concepts in terms of how much they embody the principles.
5. If the design opportunities you’ve found require substantial change to a current product, service, or system, or the creation of a new product, service, or system to complement or build out existing ones, then continue your design process by creating these principles to define your intended impact. Keep these principles front-of-mind to evaluate whether you have made a principled change in the existing experience as you step through the design phase.