Doctolib — Case study
Design Principles
From Reflection to Action
The Context
With a design team of more than 65 people across several countries and time zones, day-to-day collaboration wasn’t enough to sustain cohesion, momentum and shared purpose.
So we created Design Days: a quarterly ritual where the whole design organization comes together to share work, solve problems and, above all, inspire each other.
These days became more than a showcase. They became a mirror: a space for honest reflection, critique and alignment.
In the Q2 2024 session, the team surfaced a recurring challenge:
“We’re moving fast—but we’re not always moving together.”
We identified three core concerns:
Inconsistency across products and platforms
Varying interpretations of quality
No shared language to advocate for design with tech and product partners
It wasn’t a tooling issue. It was a principles issue.
We were missing a common foundation.
Our Response: Principles, Not Just Patterns
As a leadership team, we knew a new component library or workflow wouldn’t solve this. The team needed a framework for making decisions, not a set of rules to follow.
So we introduced three design principles, each backed by familiar analogies, real-world relevance and a philosophy that could scale:
Intentional
Everything we design starts with purpose.
We don’t add features; we solve real problems, grounded in evidence and focused on outcomes.
Essential
Do less, but do it exceptionally well.
We reduce noise, mental load and unnecessary options, creating space for care, clarity and confidence.
Familiar
We build on what people know and trust.
Patterns matter. Predictability isn’t the enemy of innovation; it enables adoption.
These principles weren’t created to sound clever in a slide deck.
They were made to guide real work.
How we brought it to life
For principles to matter, they had to move from language into everyday practice. We set up an expert group to put them into action in four areas:
Figma Integration
We built a Figma template that helps designers align decisions with the three principles. Questions like “Can we simplify this?” or “Does this feel familiar?” become part of everyday design thinking.
Playbooks
We rebuilt internal presentation templates and documentation guides around the principles.
Teams could now tell consistent stories about their work, anchored in shared values.
Design Reviews
We restructured our review rituals so every critique ties back to Intentional, Essential or Familiar.
This gave teams a shared vocabulary for feedback, adding clarity and reducing subjectivity.
A Visual Identity Designers Are Proud to Wear
We created a visual system around the principles, used in swag, slides and storytelling.
It wasn’t just branding. It was about belonging.
