Guiding Principles

Guiding principles include:

Design System Principles

Design of the HarvardSites Design System is guided by our ACES principles:

Accessible – to support disability inclusion on our digital campus.
Communal – to support digital governance centrally and in schools and units.
Empowering – to support creation of attractive, engaging, accessible, and effective websites.
Scalable – to allow websites to adapt gracefully along with standards and technologies.

First Principles of Digital Design

Our design approach is influenced by industry standard first principles of digital design:

Accessibility First — designing accessible user experiences from the start rather than retrofitting designs for accessibility.
Content First — focusing designs on foregrounding content rather than aesthetics.
Mobile First — designing the user experience on mobile devices first, before designing for larger viewports.

Universal Principles of Design

Design system components incorporate Gestalt principles of perception and other universal design principles, including:

Alignment — aligning elements to create balanced and cohesive designs.
Good Continuation — grouping and aligning elements to convey relatedness.
Proximity — using proximity to associate related elements.
Similarity — designing similar elements with similar characteristics.
Uniform Connectedness — enclosing related elements and regions to convey relatedness.
Figure-Ground Relationship — emphasizing content over background to focus attention.
Consistency — providing elements consistently to improve usability and ease of learning.

Additionally, the HarvardSites Design System is designed to support best practices for content and interaction, including:

Chunking — breaking content into targeted and cohesive units to make it easier to process and remember.
Legibility — focusing on clarity of content and controls to support ease of use and readability.

Principles of Professional Ethics

Finally, our work is guided by professional ethics, and we take as a starting point the principle, Avoid harm. Therefore, the elements that comprise the HarvardSites Design System are intentionally designed to minimize the potential for negative effects on product and platform users (see Principle 1.2, Avoid harm of the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct).