Redesigning Territories V2 — Part 1: Design Principles

by Kevin Jiang & Rachel Chak

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TLDR; We stepped back to reimagine Territories with a new design framework. Over an 8-week process, we established four core principles — Pluralism, Trust, Circularity, and Sensitivity — to ensure the platform remains flexible, user-centered, and ready to grow with the needs of our communities.

Read Part 2 here.

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Outgrowing your own product is a wild experience.

The relentless pursuit of a Minimal Viable Product at a 0-1 company had left our team feeling that new functionality, features, and user needs could not be properly addressed without a full, systematic, rethinking of our core product experience.

There’s never quite a good time to do a redesign, and as a product that has yet to find product market fit, it’s hard to justify the priority of redesigning the existing surface for non-functional purposes. However, a few questions consistently came up that led us to consider a redesign of our core Territories feature:

1. If our goal is to build a modern reading/writing product, what does that look and feel like? What does it mean to have a modern designed product?
2. How do we design spaces that allow for future feature expansion? Our product at the moment feels fragmented and un-holistic as new features are being added to designs that had not considered future possibilities.
3. How do we improve the overall quality of our designs?
4. How do we leverage design and user experience to differentiate ourselves from competitor products?

To answer these questions, we had to reorganize the way we thought, discussed, and approached the design practice at t2, starting from establishing foundations with design principles.

t2’s Design Principles

For the first time ever in t2’s history, we’ve distilled down, verbalized, and defined 4 key principles that will guide our design moving forward.

Like any principles, these are core values that we think apply well and deeply to our current situation, and we expect to evolve and adjust them as t2 continues to grow.

Pluralism

We believe in designing different levels of customisation to accommodate different levels of expression. We ensure individual expression and diverse community engagement options, allowing users to navigate t2 according to their unique preferences and goals.

Trust

Our designs prioritise user safety and trust, creating an environment where users feel confident and secure in their interactions, with clear actions and transparent communication.

Circularity

We draw from the past to shape the future, balancing familiarity with innovation to deliver a credible and relevant user experience. Our designs evolve alongside user needs, embracing emerging trends and technologies while preserving timeless usability.

Sensitivity

Our designs are built on transparency and empathy, offering personalised guidance that empowers users to navigate with confidence and autonomy. By anticipating and responding to user needs, we foster an environment that encourages exploration and meaningful engagement.

Design Principles Workshop & Process

To get to a shortlist of 4 principles above, we conducted a multi-step workshop over the span of 8 weeks. We involved major stakeholders including product, design, marketing, and engineering as well, to ensure a diversity of perspectives and ideas.

Taking inspiration Linear and Spotify’s workshops, we segmented the workshop into 3 key phases:

1. Blue-Sky Brainstorm: gather design inspiration from our own imaginations of how our company, product, industry, might look like in the distant future
2. Design Critique: understand the design of our current platform and those of our contemporaries, and what the gaps might be
3. Design Concepts: utilizing the results from phases 1 & 2, create concepts that exemplify our design principles

In the next few sections, we’ll breakdown each phase in more detail.

Blue-Sky Brainstorm

Ditching all sensibilities of practicality, and resource confinements, we started our workshop process with a typical blue-sky thinking exercise. We brainstormed how the future of the publishing industry might look in 5, 10, 30 years, how t2 might fit into that world, and what mediums social engagement might look like.

Starting the design principles process this way allowed us to come up with original and relevant ideas, that felt authentic to t2. In contrast, a typical moodboard approach overemphasizes visual components, cornering us into what others think is good instead.

To bring more tangibility to these abstract ideas, our next session consisted of brainstorming and synthesizing specific words, phrases, and definitions we thought could be possible options to represent our design principles.

Here, semantics matter. Design principles aren’t just our core values, but an embodiment of our approach to our work. ChatGPT (or even an old-school Thesaurus) proved helpful to find words that encompassed multiple ideas and had the right connotation.

Design Critique

The next step was to critique our own product. Looking at key surfaces of our product, we critiqued how our new design principles applied (or often times, did not apply) to the current product to help us understand where the gaps were between where we were and where we wanted to be.

In addition to understanding our own product, we also analyzed and critiqued contemporary products in the market that we felt had relevance to t2 to help us understand possible gaps between our product and others. This served as a benchmarking exercise for user experience to see how we stacked up against other major content platforms.

We primarily looked at other platforms that were handling different content types and a variety of use cases, such as YouTube, Spotify, Are.na, and Reddit, focusing on key surfaces like the Homepage, content components, profile pages, and discovery surfaces.

Design Concepts

Principles are ineffective unless everyone on the team understands what they are and how to use them. In order to create strong alignment of how to apply them, we gave our designers some time to explore completely new concepts for key product surfaces without the restrictions of product or engineering.

Conclusion

While the design principles workshop required significant time investment from all parties, the process was just as big as the impact. We now had a shared and defined standard for design to build off of moving forward. In part 2, Rachel Chak posts her reflections on the redesign process of Territories V2!