Adaptive Path Blog

I recently chatted with Jensen Harris, commonly known as the man behind the Microsoft Office ribbon interface. Jensen will be joining us in 2 weeks as a UX Week speaker. I find it interesting that both Jensen and Adaptive Path share a strong belief in using what we call “design principles” and he calls “design tenets”. Whatever name you prefer, these are well defined goals that drive the creation of your product. It is critical that the entire team working on a product share ownership of these principles, be it management or design or engineering.

Here’s a snippet from the complete interview:

DH: We sat on a panel together at MIX discussing techniques to “Get It Right” when developing software. You mentioned the use of what you call “Design Tenets.” What are these and why are they so important?

JH: Design tenets are a list of shared design beliefs that a team uses to help them make consistent design choices. Think of it as your team’s design philosophy. It’s the way we were able to end up with a design that has a coherent voice despite the fact that many people contributed to it.

For Office 2007, we had six design tenets. One of them was: “Give features a permanent home — prefer consistent-location UI over ‘smart’ UI.” Another was: “The user’s focus should be on the content, not on the UI; help the user work without interference.”

Before you start designing, you need to explicitly agree on the tenets your team believes in — those which are consistent with the kind of user experience you want to create.

Once you have your design tenets, you can use them to help make decisions when you have several design alternatives to choose from. If everyone consistently makes decisions based on the tenets, your user experience will hold together and feel like it was designed with a single voice.

There’s still space for UX Week, and if you register with the promo code BLOG you get 10% off.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 9:12 am and is filed under Events, Interaction Design, Interface Design, People You Should Know. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.