Design concepts guide

Why have design phase principles

Design phase principles allow designers and design teams to constantly align our designs to the needs and desires of their audience. 

As teams create and iterate during the design phase, they run the risk of losing touch with the urgency of the needs and values expressed by participants during the discovery phase. Having a set of guiding principles gives design teams the parameters they need to constantly reference participants’ needs and perspectives as the design phase proceeds.

Global principles

Global design phase principles are a high-level means of defining design phase work, agnostic of project type. They are applicable across the fields for which we design in the public sector, and can help teams maintain focus on their main objective throughout a multi-parted, challenging design process. These principles can be derived from the opportunity spaces identified at the end of the discovery phase. They encompass the main learnings from the participants in the discovery phase; they are not tactical rules and guidance for the team.

Below, find a sample set of global design principles. These principles, alongside those that you might create for your specific project, will help ensure that the designed product, service, or solution that your team develops embodies the perspectives and needs of your current and potential participants. These will be explained in detail in the following sections.

Project-level principles

In addition to global design principles, individual teams should create a set of guiding principles tailored to the specific project on which they’re working. For example, if the design idea is to create a knowledge-sharing repository for a department, a project-level principle could be to design the repository’s submission structure on how the department members want to submit articles and notes, rather than how it would be easiest to build from a technical standpoint.