We don’t choose our design principles. The most effective principles choose us.

The best principles become powerful tools for making hard design decisions. At some point, we’ll be faced with a demanding choice between a quick win and a design alternative that will deliver a substantially improved experience for our users and customers. The best design principles will easily guide us to putting in the hard work and making the difficult decisions.

In this session, Jared will discuss how past difficult design decisions can show us the principles that reflect our values. He’ll walk us through a workshop exercise for identifying principles that’s both fun and effective.

Before the talk gets started:

• How this discussion will go:

  • 20 - 30 minutes short presentation on today's topic.
  • Remainder of the time will be spent discussing your questions.
    • Please put your questions in the chat.
    • Please change your Zoom name to your actual name.
    • Leah Walker will collect the questions and pick the ones we'll answer today.

• Things to keep in mind with Zoom:

  • If the little Chat pop-ups get distracting, feel free to open the chat window.
  • Please put your microphone on mute.
    • If Leah chooses your question, you can unmute to talk about it with Jared
  • Zoom's Speaker View will let you keep Jared visible and you'll see what he's presenting on the screen.
  • This session is closed captioned.

We will post the recording for this session within a day.

Notes for today's discussion:

We need to reframe the way we talk about design principles.

The way we talk about them today isn't working.

Many think that design principles state the values of the UX team.

The reality is they need to a reflection of the values of the UX team.

Values only matter when they are the difficult path.

When sticking with your values is the easy choice, they are just aphorisms.

Statements of beliefs that everyone agrees with.

When do we fight for our principles?

What does that fight look like?

Theoretically, every UX professional should "take a bullet" for these principles.

Teams already have values when you form them.

They are the collective values of the team members.

If principles state the values of the UX team, then we should hire UX people who only believe in those values and principles.

Since the principles rarely come up in the hiring process, they don't reflect the values.