A product or service must stand out to compete with established brands. Companies might differentiate in price, offering a lower-cost option for budget-conscious customers, or build prestige brands that signal status. Others may rely on marketing, tailoring a familiar product to new audiences.
While all can be effective methods for bringing a product to market, some of the most significant product launches owe their impact to a human-centered approach known as design thinking. Teams that succeed in design thinking can identify design principles that match real customer needs.
But what exactly are design principles? How can product teams or entrepreneurs identify them to inform their designs? And how do they fit into the broader framework of design thinking?
Understanding Design Thinking to Inform Design Principles
Design thinking is a user-centered, solutions-focused framework for innovation. Rather than assuming what an ideal product should be, design thinking forces teams to understand customers’ wants, needs, and goals, then design solutions to address them.
Design thinking involves a four-stage process:
- Clarifying the user problem that must be addressed
- Ideating on potential solutions
- Developing fully formed concepts to prototype and test
- Implementing a product launch by communicating its value to consumers and stakeholders
Design thinking’s ultimate goal is to balance users’ needs with business viability and general feasibility, offering a repeatable way to create products that resonate.
Check out the video about the design thinking process below, and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more explainer content!
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What Are Design Principles?
“Design principles” might evoke visual guidelines, such as balance, color theory, or hierarchy. In the context of design thinking, the term “design principles” means something completely different.
In Design Thinking and Innovation, one of the online courses in the six-month Credential of Digital Innovation and Strategy, Harvard Business School Dean Srikant Datar defines design principles as the characteristics a solution needs to be user-focused and effective in addressing a problem or challenge.
To put it simply, these principles are the key requirements guiding a product’s function, appearance, and marketing.
Examples of Design Principles
Because design principles are specific to each product, broad examples can be tricky. To illustrate what design principles can look like, consider the following scenario highlighted in Design Thinking and Innovation: designing a new mop.
Innovating a New Mop
In the first scenario, the product team has identified several pain points associated with using a traditional mop:
- Physical strain when mopping
- Difficulty reaching corners
- Need to clean the mop itself
- Slow-drying floors
- Handles of inconvenient length
- Dependence on water sources and heavy, spill-prone buckets
- Inconsistent cleaning can leave floors looking unkempt
From these insights, the product team identified three guiding design principles for a new solution:
- Ease of use
- Cleanliness
- Efficient cleaning
These principles form the foundation for ideation and prototype testing, ensuring every design choice addresses real user needs.
Questions to Help Identify Your Own Design Principles
Identifying relevant design principles early strengthens the innovation process. Clear design principles establish goals for ideation, keeping team discussions focused on user needs and providing a framework for evaluating which ideas best meet them.
If you’re unsure where to start, use these guiding questions:
What’s the Customer’s Primary Goal?
Before defining the final product, establish its basic function. How will it be used? What are customers trying to accomplish with your product? What’s the minimum value it must provide compared with competing brands?
Consider a different example shared in Design Thinking and Innovation: An organization seeking to create an alternative to traditional bicycle helmets. Because the primary reason customers purchase and wear bicycle helmets is to protect their heads in a fall or crash, the primary purpose of your solution must also be protection. With this in mind, one key design principle for your innovation could be “strong enough to absorb impact.”
What Pain Points Exist with Competing Products?
Design Thinking and Innovation defines pain points as the moments in time when a customer experiences frustration, difficulty, or uncertainty. Understanding these frustrations reveals opportunities to differentiate.
Consider bicycle helmets again: Many riders avoid them because they’re bulky, brightly colored, or clash with outfits. Knowing this, a guiding design principle could be “stylish” to overcome that barrier.
What Aspirations Drive the Purchase?
Customers don’t base every buying decision on pain or frustration alone; many purchases support personal goals. By uncovering these aspirations, you can position your product as a tool that helps customers reach those objectives.
Take the bicycle helmet example. Not every rider races, but some cyclists dream of winning competitions. To move faster, they look for lightweight equipment. Your design team might therefore add “lightweight” as a key design principle for a new helmet.
How Should You Rank Your Design Principles?
It’s rarely possible to satisfy every design principle equally. Some goals may conflict. Early in ideation, you must decide which trade-offs to accept.
Continuing the helmet example, “strong enough to absorb impact” and “lightweight” can pull in opposite directions. A team must determine which matters most—or innovate to achieve both. Successfully solving these competing requirements can spark innovation and position your product as an industry disruptor.
Design Principles and Design Thinking
Identifying design principles is essential, but only one part of the broader design thinking process. Other key elements include:
- Choosing the proper methods to gather customer insights and observations
- Applying creative solutions and behavior-change analysis within teams
- Using human-centered design techniques, such as user research, prototyping, and journey mapping
- Assessing group dynamics to strengthen team performance
You can build a design thinking mindset through independent study, but structured learning accelerates the process. An online course like Design Thinking and Innovation covers design thinking fundamentals and provides a strategic innovation toolkit you can use to apply design principles immediately.
While important, design thinking isn’t the only skill needed to thrive in today’s digital landscape. Knowing how to build and lead digital teams, create and manage digital marketing strategies, and implement and scale digital platforms are also critical. The Credential of Digital Innovation and Strategy can give you a jumpstart in those areas.
Are you ready to enhance your understanding of design principles and apply them in your personal and professional life? Explore the Credential of Digital Innovation and Strategy, which includes the online course Design Thinking and Innovation. To explore all our digital transformation programs, download our free course flowchart to find the right fit.
