Digital Experience Design Principles

1. Understand your users

Build services that meet or exceed user needs.

Getting a full understanding of the user perspective (beyond just their use of a particular service) means you can create new and better ways of solving problems.

2. Design for context

Understand the users’ environment and the context of use.

Understanding how a service fits into the user’s wider environment means you can make that service truly useful, usable and desirable.

3. Design for inclusivity

Build services that are accessible to all users.

Everything we build should be accessible and readable for all audiences.

4. Always evidence decisions

Design based on robust evidence of user needs.

Decision making should never be led by guesswork or anecdotal experience. Having robust research means you can properly establish user needs and validate the proposed solutions.

5. Evaluate continuously

Review regularly with users to ensure services meet their needs.

Teams who regularly observe end users make better decisions and deliver the best solutions.

6. Be consistent, but not uniform

Promote familiarity, but stay user-centred.

Using consistent language and design patterns helps understanding, but you should be ready to change if you find evidence that another approach better meets users’ needs.

7. Work transparently

Sharing work as you go along gives students and colleagues a chance to offer feedback, which improves the service.

8. Collaborate across disciplines

The most effective services are designed by staff with different perspectives coming together to understand and solve problems.

9. Be open to change

Perfection is a mythical state; be open to an ongoing process of improvement.

Measuring the Principles

Our Standards detail how you can measure the success of your project against our Principles at each of the three design phases.

Design phases

Measuring success

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