2025Design Principles
Why we’ve done it
Our team's State of Design survey surfaced a clear gap: designers were making product decisions without a shared point of reference, which meant experiences across our platforms weren't always consistent, and design conversations often relitigated the same trade-offs from scratch. There was no agreed definition of what "good" looked like for our users.
What it’s for
A set of six design principles — Efficient, Empowering, Informative, Seamless, Simple, Trustworthy — that define what our members need and value most, and give the design team (and the wider business) a shared language for making and defending product decisions. Each principle pairs a clear standard with an explicit anti-pattern ("no jargon, no misleading"), so it's actionable rather than aspirational. They're now used in critique, design reviews and prioritisation conversations to keep decisions consistent as the team and product scale.
My role
I led the project end-to-end. I designed and facilitated a series of 8 workshops with the design team, structured around multiple rounds of divergent and convergent thinking — first exploring broadly what our users stand for and need, then narrowing repeatedly until we converged on six principles that underpinned the values of all our products and their users. I was responsible for the workshop design, facilitation, synthesis of the research into the final principles, and the visual language used to communicate and roll them out.