Design Principles of Nord Design System
Nordhealth hired me in 2020 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 and goals for the system that we could follow as a team. We came up with four primary goals for Nord. At the same time, I also created design principles for the design systems work that would form the foundations for Nord and help us do better and more informed decisions. I’ve listed them below.
1. Put user needs first
We care for the people who use our products. We’re here to make their day-to-day and long-term work better and more pleasant through great user experience.
2. Strive for consistency, not uniformity
We should use the same language and design patterns wherever possible. This helps people get familiar with our services. Same holds true for the system and its developer experience.
3. Default to openness
We should share what we’re doing whenever we can. Building our services transparently increases their visibility and accountability and makes us push towards higher quality.
4. Make it accessible
Our services are for everyone. We make sure people with different needs can use our products and that they meet the accessibility standards outlined in WCAG 2.1.
5. Provide a good developer experience
Providing a good developer experience is very important to us. Developers should be able to start using our tools in minutes, not hours, days or weeks.
6. Automate everything you can
We value the time of our colleagues, users, and our future selves over our own. We are always proactively looking for ways to automate repetitive tasks and testing.
