The 2 design principles that came out of design crit this month, the one-line CSS change that made a table easy to scan, and 4 books on keeping a product simple as it grows.
Design debt is the part of being an established product that doesn’t show up in a demo. A startup building in our space doesn’t have 12 years of pattern libraries, and we do, so every new pattern we add on top of them is one more thing a clinician has to learn. If we keep adding, that’s what starts to hurt us in the long run.
The first 2 principles for what we’re calling simplicity at scale came out of design crit, not a workshop. One of my design leaders and I started drafting them in our weekly 1:1 from things we’d both watched happen in the room, and the plan is to write those 2 down and see what the other design leaders want to add.
1. Reuse over novelty. New and exciting doesn’t mean new patterns. It means getting a person to the finished job faster. Reuse everything you can, because the moment you introduce a new pattern is the moment you introduce relearning. One of my design directors finished the thought better than I did: don’t limit the hotness, limit the new patterns. You can still find the hotness in existing things, on purpose. The part that falls on leaders is pushing back when something new shows up that shouldn’t be new.
2. Judge it in context. We lost time recently debating an icon for an AI entry point on its own, when what mattered was the nav around it, the header, and the buttons next to it. Every designer should pass this test, and it applies to our AI tools too: prompt them for realistic flows in place, zoomed out to the whole product, not just your part of it. Design crit this week showed why. A designer brought 3 AI-generated layouts for a tracker built around a recurring deadline, and a senior designer caught that the horizontal stepper looked like the tabs used elsewhere in the product, which implies you can click it. The actual behavior is a deadline that moves forward on its own. Another designer said the vertical version reads as a progression of time you don’t control, and it won. Someone called out the AI fingerprints all over the first drafts, and the fix they suggested was to strip it to black and white with one color for the finished step.
Don’t limit the hotness, limit the new patterns. You can still find it in what already exists, on purpose.
A third move isn’t a principle so much as a habit. That same director noticed a table where every row was vertically centered, changed it to top-aligned, and the table went from hard to scan to easy, night and day. He sent the one-line fix to an engineer, who said he’d sneak it in. You won’t catch that in crit, and you’ll only see more of it if leaders do it themselves and talk about it. So I’m going to keep pointing at these out loud when they happen.
Some of the most important simplicity work is invisible. Polish is one obsession we should have, and the things that help a product grow and scale, like accessibility, deserve the same care. One of my design managers described it as a muscle that should feel as easy as centering something, and he had the right strategy for it too: fix by workflow, not by issue list, because fixing step 3 doesn’t matter if steps 1 and 2 are already broken. Keyboard first, then screen readers.
He also offered the analogy I’ll borrow from now on. A premium product is like a premium car: all the doors shut properly. That’s part of what it means to be a flagship product, and most of it is work nobody will ever see.
Four books on keeping a product simple as it grows.
The shelf
