Experience principles
Toward the end of discovery, before you start rallying around potential solutions, take the time to identify the experience principles for the product. These are based on themes from research and are aspirations for the ideal state of the product. These should be used as guiding principles when making design or development decisions.
Outcome
A set of principles that help guide product decision-making for all members of the team.
Method
- Identify themes
- Add in pain points, needs, and other insights from user research.
- Affinity map them into groups and assign a theme to each group.
- Prioritize the most important themes
- Have the team vote for the 5-6 themes that they feel are the most important to prioritize.
- From theme (insight) to principle
- For each theme, have team members draft principles that address them.
- For example, a theme of, “The same information is asked for multiple times in the process” could have the principle, “Ask for information once, and keep track of it.”
- Refine
- There is no “right” way to do this. You can put someone in charge to pull together pieces from various teammates’ principles and write a final draft of principles for everyone’s review. You can edit things in real time as a group. You can vote on which teammates’ principles you like best and move forward that way, too.
- Think: Concise, memorable, and specific to the project/product.