Design Principles of Duet Design System
LocalTapiola hired me in 2019 to help reimagine what the company’s approach to designing, building and shipping digital products at scale should look like. I started this work by conducting a series of user research activities and workshops to reveal a lack of alignment and personal biases across business units, products and teams to understand how the design system could help them.
When we had a clear view of the challenges that we wanted to solve, it was a matter of creating fundamental principles for the system that we could follow as a team. These are the principles that I created for Duet:
1. Universality
Universality is in the core of the World Wide Web, so we should embrace it and build systems that are available to, and accessible by, everyone.
2. Consistency
Consistency enhances clarity and makes our system more predictable and efficient to use. Users shouldn’t have to wonder whether different actions or terminology used mean the same thing.
3. Performance
Good performance is good user experience. We should strive towards making our system as fast as possible in terms of both network footprint and the time it takes to become interactive.
4. Modularity
Modularity reduces complexity and improves our system’s reusability by breaking it into small, easy to consume parts.
