Product Design principles
What are the purpose of principles?
Principles serve as an effective way to short-circuit debate. They ground us in a common vocabulary and set of preferences that help guide the design decisions we make. They shouldn't limit creativity, but rather focus creative energy on the areas where divergent thinking matters most.
How do we use them?
✅ We repeat them: Repetition is key to principles remaining top of mind.
✅ We integrate them into our work: Through touchpoints like crits, reviews, and project sign off.
✅ We leverage them in our critique: We use them to tether and prioritize feedback.
Be a coach
Why this matters: Our users are experts at their day jobs, not necessarily all that Lattice's offers. Companies are also at varying levels of maturity in their HR processes. By meeting them where they are during set up and providing guidance to create best-in-class processes along the way, we’ll set them on a path of delight, long term value, and advocacy.
Tactics
- Help the user understand the tradeoffs between the flexible options we provide.
- Assume the user doesn’t know the value that’s ahead. Show them.
- Ensure the entry point to the feature/workflow is intuitively discoverable.
- Leverage templates wherever possible to help users understand what good looks like.
- Leverage our rich content collection to help users understand the impact of a workflow.
- Don’t just design a text input, pair it with guidance.
- Help the user understand the remaining steps and how they get them closer to value.
- When possible, do the obvious next step for them.
Build confidence with clarity
Why this matters: Our users make high risk, high visibility decisions that impact their company, team, or peers in our product, often with a few clicks of a button. If they’re unsure about the outcomes of their decision, they’ll be unlikely to take action. What’s more, if they make a high impact decision that negatively impacts their credibility or creates challenging situations for their team, they quickly lose trust in the whole product.
Tactics
- Clearly communicate the ramifications of user decisions
- Clearly communicate who sees what
- Show or tell the user where this info will be surfaced
Celebrate moments that matter
Why this matters: Our platform’s mission is to help make work meaningful. It’s filled with a number of actions, steps, and milestones that each contribute toward that outcome in some way. By celebrating the meaningful ones, we remind the user of this and put a smile on their face while we’re at it.
Tactics
- Plot out the user journey and identify the meaningful moments and find ways to mark those moments.
- Plot out the user journey and identify the painful/tedious moments and find ways to build in micro-interactions that encourage progress.
- When celebrating, help reinforce the importance/significance of the moment.
- When celebrating, match the reward to the effort put in by the user.
Show the full picture
Why this matters: The aggregate activity in Lattice provides managers, MoMs, and leaders with the trends needed to make decisions about their org. So it’s important that we surface and synthesize all of what they’re privy to.
Tactics
- Reduce the number of places where leaders have to go to answer a question.
- When showing data, enable leaders to see as far as their orgs extend.
- When showing data, prioritize the synthesis that tells an actionable story.
- When possible, present data over time to illuminate trend directions.
