Strategic principles
24 June 2012
I’m currently writing a digital strategy for the organisation I work for - a non-profit promoting science.
I want to include some principles as part of the strategy - to help us make decisions about which projects to undertake and how to design them. They’re inspired by the Government’s own design principles.
- User needs: The design process must start with identifying and thinking about real user needs. We should design around those - not around existing processes.
- Holism: Our audiences and customers see us as one organisation. We should build coherent user journeys that work across different services.
- Accessibility: Our users are diverse and all should be able to access our services equally. We should build products that are as inclusive, legible and readable as possible. Our services should be available where our users want to access them, whichever device or platform that is on.
- Longevity: We should build services that last and that can be accessed for years to come. Our digital information should be preserved and archived for future generations.
- Openness: Openness means that other people can build on our work and share it more widely. We should share our content others and release it under a liberal copyright licence. We should use open standards and open formats where possible and avoid becoming locked to particular platforms. Our services should be interoperable and extendable.
- Social: Social media is creating a new relationship between organisations and users, in which the conversation is two-way and content is co-created. We should use social media to communicate with our audiences and customers and we should always consider it when we’re designing new services.
- Security: We may face security risks. We should ensure that we adopt a level of security appropriate to each risk. Consistency: Consistency means that people become familiar with us and trust us more. We should use consistent language and design patterns wherever possible.
- Feedback loop: Building in a strong feedback loop means we get better over time. We should use feedback from users - surveys, testing or analytics - as much as possible throughout the prototyping and development phases and when a service is deployed.