It’s an unwritten rule of our product design team at Salesforce that whenever anyone comes up with a list — a feature list, a research report, even a T-shirt catalog — whatever it is in the form of a list, someone will come up and ask, “Was it prioritized?”

Sometimes it’s habitual, sometimes it’s serious, but trust me, on a team like this, no one wants to go through any unprioritized list like a rookie.

We joke about it ourselves sometimes, but to be fair, the prioritization mindset is worth sticking with because we have so much to do and so little to do. A clearly focused prioritization model represents a rigorous decision-making process and, like a well-directed roadbed, provides effective guidance for the entire team to take action.

So it was natural that when we developed the basic design principles for the Salesforce Lightning platform, we also prioritized them. It is very important for our product design decisions whether the weight relationship between several basic design principles is clear.

Design trip

Lightning is Salesforce’s new experience platform, designed for maximum productivity, which can be expanded more freely by our customers and partners. In the process of creating Lightning, we also created the Salesforce Lightning design system to demonstrate how to create and use page components in Lightning platform.

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Such a complex design system is by no means easy. The whole Lightning platform took several years to build, and the initial design work also started from chaos and confusion.

We talked to customers, collected use cases, sketched out functional flows, and worked quickly with product and engineering teams through wireframes. We pushed the process forward in a way that any design team would be comfortable with, and the initial process was stable.

However, as we started to improve the fidelity of our design solutions, some unexpected problems began to emerge. More and more, we’re starting to ask ourselves:

“Does it bother users that the two things seem inconsistent?”

As designers, we care about consistency. It is easy to point out the problem, but hard to solve it. And even if we eliminate all of the current inconsistencies, how can we be sure that we have really solved the problem in the big picture? We increasingly feel that there is a lack of a design framework that takes the problem to the next level and speeds up decision making. We needed a way for everyone on the team to understand the right design intent and keep everyone moving in the same direction at both the overall and detailed level. We need basic design principles of prioritization to guide our design communication and decision-making.

Design principles

We set out to identify some of the basic design principles that are most important to our clients, our products, and the designers themselves.

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In the end, we distilled four core principles that help shape our design thinking to judge specific solutions and make the right design decisions.

clear

Eliminate ambiguity and help people understand and use products more accurately.

efficient

Make the process smoother and smarter. Optimize the function logic, predict the demand, let people use more easily and quickly.

consistent

For the same problem, provide the same solution, reduce the user’s cognitive and memory load, so that the interface operation mode is more intuitive.

beautiful

Carefully polish the appearance of the interface, so that people feel that our products are worth their time and energy to use.

Rank design principles

Having listed the most basic design principles, it’s time to prioritize them. Is “beautiful” more important than “clear”? Prioritizing “consistency” or “efficiency”? We conducted a thought experiment: if each principle were taken to its extreme, how would they affect each other? Here’s what we came up with.

Clarity is the most important part of our experience. Users need to complete tasks and achieve goals in a clear enough interface environment. If we can ensure that our users successfully accomplish their goals over and over again, we will earn their trust and loyalty. So we put clarity first.

Efficiency is one of the most common words we hear when we communicate with our customers. We almost want to put it first. But when we zoom in on this factor as much as possible, we see problems. The command line mode is the most efficient tool for the expert user, but too sophisticated for the average user. If the “efficiency” is pushed to the extreme, a large number of users will be scared, they will only make mistakes in the operation process, which is a high cost for users. So we put “efficient” in second place.

Consistency is critical to establishing design patterns and creating intuitive product experiences. But if there is too much uniformity, the system will never have a chance to evolve. Leave room for timely design innovations, and don’t sacrifice something more important for the sake of consistency. So we put it in third place.

Beauty, while important to designers, is never a core element of the experience. For products, especially enterprise type products, achieving goals is always the first priority. Many so-called beautiful product designs are boring to use, and user interfaces that look amazing are often hard to recognize and remember. Beauty is an important means to enhance the experience and inspire pleasure, but for us it is impossible to prioritize it over any other design principle.

Practical use

Then, we began to use the prioritized design principles to guide us when discussing design schemes. Throughout the design process, we constantly remind ourselves to focus on clear, efficient, consistent and beautiful experiences. In design reviews, these principles and the way they are weighted also apply. Prioritizing design principles can also help us make clear decisions in complex situations that require multiple trade-offs. In collaboration with other relevant teams, we also preach and apply this framework of principles to ensure the smooth communication of design solutions.

Today, this set of priorities not only plays an important role within the UX team, but also throughout the company, from product teams to marketing teams, where they are being used to aid decision making.

As designers, our goal is to use these principles more freely and effectively when creating product design solutions. When all these elements of the experience work together in a reasonable and organic way, we can say that we have truly built a product that users can love.

(” Good design is Good business “– Thomas Watson,IBM).