Principles for design practice

I recently published an article on our team-level operating principles and what they mean to us—these principles apply to every member of the team, regardless of position or practice, but what about individual disciplines?

Creating discipline-level principles is a little different—they’re used by everyone on the team, but in different ways: those who practice the discipline use them to guide the work; others use them to critique the work produced.

It’s worth noting that the design principles below aren’t intended to last forever. Like any operating principles, they should evolve alongside the team and business. If things change, we’ll change—and so will how we operate.

Our design principles

These principles are intended as both lenses through which to critique design, and as guiding forces to be referenced when creating the work. They should feature in conversation as often as the work does.

Optimise for shipping

Shipping more often means learning more quickly. When creating a piece of work, think about how we could ship something in half the time, or half of that. Paint with a broad brush and don’t get lost in the details too quickly. Think about how work can be simplified and deconstructed.

Behaviours

• You doggedly pursue ambitious shipping goals
• You constantly look for opportunities to simplify
• You design things with positive future potential
• You don’t get lost in low-level details too soon
• You look for opportunities to reuse your work
• You hold yourself and others to agreed targets

Embrace the platform

We’re a realtime company that powers billions of interactions across the web — our work should communicate the potential of highly interactive experiences and our respect for the technologies that make it possible. We make the web move; we should be the last to be standing still.

Behaviours

• You use motion to communicate more with less
• You work creatively within the web’s constraints
• You create work that feels highly interactive
• You work collaboratively to uncover possibilities
• You use depth intuitively to make things clear
• You consider experiences across devices and sizes

Make each detail count

Details that don’t have a clear job don’t have a place in our work. The things we make should work incredibly hard to communicate with our customers. In the tension between quality and quantity, choose the former, and question new things that are added to ensure they have a place.

Behaviours

• You squeeze out every drop of design’s potential
• You can clearly and fully articulate your reasoning
• You use fewer elements that collectively do more
• You question things that seem overly superfluous
• You polish the details to make things high quality
• You measure work by what’s removed, not added

Consider the system

We design where our customers are — both potential and present. We create experiences across the web, email, social, and more; it should be clear across the board that people are interacting with Pusher. Each sub-system should focus on coherence, re-usability, and speed.

Behaviours

• You look for opportunities to separate and re-use
• You create work that transcends a single medium
• You refer to the system when creating or critiquing
• You collaborate to implement the system effectively
• You update and refine the system as you learn more
• You effectively demonstrate how the system works

Don’t just be different

We’re more interested in being authentic and high quality than in being idiosyncratic. Quality is a differentiator in itself, and our idiosyncrasies should come from an informed place. We don’t choose to look or feel different for the sake of it; if we look different, it’s because we are.

Behaviours

• You tie design work back to Pusher and our values
• You talk about what we could be, not how we compare
• You pursue a high quality solution, first and foremost
• You can articulate and show what is uniquely Pusher
• You don’t choose non-standard patterns to be ‘different’
• You think of long-term goals over short-term accolades