Design Principles

These are the guiding values we’ve crafted as a team and plan to revisit frequently. These principles help us keep on track and stay focused on the right things. They help shape our approach to design and assist us in evaluating trade-offs during the product design process.

With absolute honesty, Certara isn’t currently fully compliant with some of our principles, but we’re working on it every day.

1. Build trust in every interaction

Trust is earned throughout the Certara experience. Through the simple and the complicated. In how we respect people’s privacy and keep their data private. We follow conventions where appropriate, and introduce changes to our products carefully.

Are we meeting not only people’s expectations of functionality and behavior, but also expectations of reliability, error prevention and recovery, speed, and security in every interaction?

2. Connect people to collaborate better

Our products are designed to bring people together to work in teams, rather than just as individuals. They are as accessible as possible, for any context or range of ability, temporary or permanent. They are as inclusive as possible, increasing confidence to contribute to the team next door or the team across the globe. They are as open as possible, for teams to discover, access, understand, contribute to, and share work wherever appropriate.

Are we encouraging inclusion, accessibility, openness, and connecting people to each other and their work?

3. Make it intuitive and familiar

Our products are individually fit-for-purpose as well as collectively harmonious. Our goal is to make everything be obvious, usable, and familiar so that users see, understand, and act with confidence. Although there’s a persistent visual and behavioral similarity, they adapt to people’s devices and contexts, rather than being consistent for the sake of consistency.

Are we balancing the expectation that learned behaviors will carry across products, with the need to adapt appearance and functionality to be more effective?

4. Prioritize progress over perfection

Our products are constantly evolving the more discover about our users. We’re sure that our future selves will have a lot to disagree about decisions we took today — and that’s perfectly ok: done is better than perfect.

When time or resources are limited, what design trade-offs would least harm the design’s success?

5. Be transparent

Transparency is the key to success. We document our design decisions so we can reference them in discussions and not reinvent the wheel again by discussing stuff repeatedly and without historical context.