Designwerte

Designwerte are the core values that guide a design project and determine decisions, trade-offs, and evaluation criteria. They are not a fixed standard but a deliberate set of guiding principles chosen to reflect user needs, business goals, and cultural context. Common designwerte include usability, accessibility, aesthetics, sustainability, privacy, safety, reliability, and maintainability.

Typically defined early in a project through collaboration among designers, developers, stakeholders, and users, designwerte are documented as statements or criteria that can be tested and balanced. They help resolve tensions between competing goals, such as speed versus quality or form versus function, by providing a shared reference point. In German-speaking design practice, they are often integrated into design briefs, design systems, and style guides to ensure consistency across teams and outputs.

In practice, designwerte influence decisions across the design process, from research and concept to material selection, interface design, typography, color, and content strategy. They can be evaluated qualitatively through user feedback and heuristics, and quantitatively via metrics like task success, error rate, accessibility scores, energy use, or life-cycle impact. While the exact set of values varies by project and industry, designwerte serve to articulate what the design should achieve beyond mere aesthetics, guiding responsible innovation and coherent user experiences.