Design Principles
When we design our products, we focus on four principles. They act as our compass and should permeate everything we do. Our design principles include a set of guidelines that will help us make well-founded design decisions. They will help all collaborators within a product organization to understand the vision and move forward in the same direction.
Our design principles should be followed by anyone working with our products, not only designers. It will help with decision making and prioritizing within every team.
Our design principles make use of values that we've had at Configura for a long time and merge them together with newer thoughts and approaches. Together, they can help us enhance the user experience.
We put the user needs first and have empathy for the user. We design with our user in mind so they can achieve their goals.
- We perform research to understand user goals, pain points and struggles.
- We design to enhance the usability for the user.
- We ask ourselves if our solution / design brings value to the user.
Our designs are simple to help the user achieve high productivity and to focus on their tasks. We provide streamlined solutions that are intuitive, simple and easy to use. We do this by:
- Focusing on the things that are important by removing unnecessary elements. We give the user what is needed when it is needed.
- Optimizing the user workload with automation whenever possible.
- Breaking complex tasks down into simple steps and removing repetitive tasks as much as possible.
- Aiding the user to stay in the flow. We interrupt, when necessary, but make sure it is easy to get back into the flow.
The design should enhance reliability and recognition. It should be predictable and have the same look and feel no matter the task. Our job is to:
- Make sure the interactions are predictable, elements are uniform and description distinct.
- Use the same language and design pattern throughout the application.
- Aim for consistency without sacrificing clarity.
We want our user to feel empowered when using our products. We want to ensure there is space for growth and for advanced users to excel. To achieve this, we:
- Hide complexity but give the user the opportunity to access the advanced interactions when needed.
- Help users to complete their tasks, without taking away decisions and the feel of control.
- Optimize the most important tasks, but do not block the user from taking charge and making adaptions.
