Limited time, limited resources and few people who have too many tasks to complete - this is what everyday life looks like for many start-ups and small companies. In this setting, it is common to take responsibility for things that do not correspond to your own expertise. And - spoiler: many decisions have to be made every day.
And when you have to make decisions that lie outside your comfort zone, both the decision-making process and its implementation take longer than they should. At the same time, you are constantly plagued by doubts as to whether these decisions are the right ones. If this potpourri of doubt, chronic lack of time and anxiety sounds familiar, you can now learn something about how to make your life a little easier. It's about introducing and utilising design principles.
Hi, I'm Jennifer Moss, co-founder of The Geekettez and AUAU Athletics®an apparel start-up that produces protective sportswear for female and gender diverse athletes. At AUAU Athletics® I am responsible for communication and customer experience design.
My expertise lies in UX design, which benefits my tasks in the area of customer experience. However, this only helps me to a limited extent for my communication tasks, especially as AUAU Athletics® is a B2C company, unlike our UX Studio.
I needed some guidance and found it in our company's design principles. To demonstrate their potential for any business, regardless of size, I'll share three areas where design principles have helped the small start-up I'm a part of.
#1 Design principles unite a company
Our team held a series of workshops to define our values. In these workshops, we identified our design principles and worked out their meaning, which helped us to develop a deep and shared understanding of our values.
Since then, our design principles - based on our values - have influenced most of the decisions we make in all areas of our company: from material procurement and production to sponsorship and communication.
No matter what problems we are trying to solve, it is easier to work out the solution with the design principles at hand, because they limit us in a positive sense. They allow us to ignore many possibilities that are irrelevant to us due to our design principles. This allows us to reach decisions more quickly, which the team can also understand, as they are based on values that we have a common understanding of.
By creating a common understanding in teams, design principles help to avoid endless discussions and decision blockades. This benefits all teams, especially those developing innovative and new services, products and scenarios. Design principles enable teams to agree on a common course and act as a compass, so to speak, for all important day-to-day decisions.
#2 Design principles promote creativity
Since using the design principles as a compass, our team feels that our ideas have become more realisable and products better. Our values-based thought process feels like a 'mental corset' - giving us stability and forcing us to explore the available space more deeply and thoroughly.
This structure has helped us to develop ideas faster and complete tasks more thoughtfully, not only because every output is reviewed and optimised until it meets our design principles, but also because everyone in our team can provide constructive feedback based on these principles - regardless of their expertise.
Design principles enable teams to work in a truly interdisciplinary way. This is because they act like an internal technical language that everyone understands and speaks - regardless of their area of expertise. We can even come up with ideas that are a little off the beaten track and that we might not even have considered if we had thought purely in terms of specialist expertise.
#3 Design principles help to sharpen the brand
Many areas of our strategy lay dormant before we started working with design principles, which led to unclear and vague communication. If you have an unclear image of your own brand in your head, it is all the more difficult for customers to grasp.
The design principles have helped us to sharpen every aspect around our communication, which has many benefits. The most obvious is that we always have something to say, because the deeper we dive into the topics that are relevant to us, the more material we find.
Another positive side effect is the shorter familiarisation period for new team members.
Design principles help to create a coherent corporate and brand image that is recognisable to customers.inside, partnerIt is easier to understand and more likely to be remembered by new team members and employees. Because stories that go beyond a product presentation are always more interesting.
Make your life easier too - we'll be happy to help you develop your design principles
Through her work at AUAU Athletics® gain direct insights into how useful design principles can be for everyday tasks - even for the smallest company.
If your organisation - regardless of size - is faced with internal power struggles, an almost non-existent, rather lax strategy or the daily struggle of content creation, design principles could be the solution to your problems.
Write to us or give us a call - We are happy to support you and your team with your challenges!
