define-design-principles

name	define-design-principles
category	design
description	Turn product values and user evidence into testable design choices. Use when a team needs shared guidance for recurring tradeoffs that rules, components, or brand adjectives do not resolve.

define-design-principles

Procedure

1. Define the decisions, users, product scope, constraints, and conflicts the principles must guide.
2. Gather research, support evidence, incidents, accessibility needs, strategy, and examples of good and harmful choices.
3. Identify recurring tensions such as speed versus control, density versus comprehension, or automation versus review.
4. Draft three to seven principles as verbs with an intended user outcome.
5. Add rationale, use cases, counterexamples, tradeoffs, and a question for applying each principle.
6. Rank principles or specify how conflicts are decided.
7. Test them against past decisions and two realistic new scenarios.
8. Remove slogans that always agree, cannot reject an option, or duplicate policy.
9. Approve, publish, and record ownership and review triggers.

Guardrails

• Do not turn preferences into universal claims about users.
• Principles cannot override safety, accessibility, privacy, or evidence.
• Preserve meaningful disagreement and excluded contexts.

Done

• A design-principles document traces each principle to evidence and a real tradeoff
• Scenario checks show that the principles change or reject options
• Conflicts, scope, ownership, and review triggers are recorded