UX Design Principles at RetailMeNot
A common problem for user experience (UX) design teams, especially growing ones, is keeping everyone on the same page. Design fads come and go, and each team member will naturally bring their own preferences, aesthetics and opinions about what constitutes good design. If a team isn’t careful, this can lead to inconsistencies and conflicts in the product, resulting in frustrated team members, confused engineers and unsatisfied users.
To address these problems, the design team at RetailMeNot recently turned to the industry practice of creating design principles.
What Are Design Principles, and What Makes Them Effective?
To quote Alla Kholmatova from her book Design Systems, “Design principles are shared guidelines that capture the essence of what good design means for the team, and advice on how to achieve it.” They can be written to address a variety of facets, including visual identity, interaction guidelines or process recommendations.
Using Kholmatova’s guidelines for effective principles, and taking a look at principles other teams have published, we decided on the following criteria:
- Inspire Action
Our principles should be tools we can use to sharpen each other’s work, and should help us choose between multiple solutions. - Company Specific
What works for us shouldn’t necessarily work for every other design team. Our principles should naturally help us separate ourselves from our competitors, and be reflective of our team’s culture and values. - Easy to Remember
Design principles need to be instinctual during our daily workflows, and shouldn’t require referencing an external document. They should be limited in number.
Creating Our Principles
In critiques and reviews, we often make comments to each other if a particular design is good or needs work, but nothing had been formally established to say what “good” meant for us. A lot of things were mutually understood but hadn’t been brought to a tangible form. The process of building our principles had to be a team effort, and would require communication, so we started a series of workshops.
Keywords
It would be unwieldy to try and make fully fleshed-out principles from the outset, so the only goal of our first meeting was to get individual words on paper. We brainstormed on a series of questions, constructed to get us writing keywords around an idealized vision of our product.
This was a good start. One word scrawled on an sticky note can’t do much. However, when you place it next to other similar words you will see patterns and clusters. If you see the same word written on multiple notes the word now has momentum, and can be a focal point for further exploration.
Candidate Principles
The clusters of sticky notes we created formed a pile of raw material for more elaborate “candidate” principles. These candidate principles were simply guesses as to what our final principles could be.
We discussed and voted on 12 candidate principles, not with the goal of narrowing to a final list, but for finding which concepts resonated most with the team, and which could be ignored.
Distillation & Refinement
Based on feedback from our workshops and some further deep-dive meetings, we settled on four keywords that make up four key design principles. We also began writing corresponding descriptions to define what each keyword means to us.
We intentionally drafted our principles in an affirmative style, describing things we “do,” not things we “could do” or “should do.” This was intended to make them more impactful, and encourage us to hold ourselves to a higher standard.
Here’s a breakdown of this finalized set of principles (in no particular order)…
Principle #1: Seamless
Seamless
Our users can save money and earn rewards with RetailMeNot with little to no effort. Our products don’t cause users to break from the flow of their daily lives.
When we are a part of a user session that is going well, our users invariably exclaim something along the lines of “this is so easy!” Ease of use is integral to our product’s success, and the most involved and challenging parts of our jobs as designers is to make complex interactions and decision points seem smooth and obvious.
To elaborate on the theme of being seamless, RetailMeNot is at its best when it is a natural part of a user’s shopping journey. Our browser extension, Genie, is a great example of this concept. When you use Genie to do online shopping, discount codes and cash back rewards can be automatically applied at an e-commerce site’s checkout screen. Users don’t have to know the complex business rules or machinations behind the scenes, they simply make an online purchase like they normally would. This way we provide a way to save money without requiring users to break from their natural flow.
Principle #2: Personal
Personal
Technology is a means to an end. We welcome and engage with every user at a human level and are responsive to their wants and needs.
The things we buy make up a lot of who we are. Our brand affinities, product research routines, and anxieties around managing our money all strike at the core of ourselves as individuals. We believe we need to connect with users at this individual level, and support every user’s own personal goals, desires and aptitudes.
The personal principle also extends to personalization. There is a phenomenon called the Alfred effect, which is when an interface is so personalized, it feels like you couldn’t imagine using another service. To see this in action, open up Netflix or Amazon and compare your homepage to a friend’s. Your options and recommendations will probably look nothing like theirs, and this is the result of years of intense effort from designers and data engineers.
We believe our products should be similar in nature. The more you use RetailMeNot to save money, the more it should adapt to reflect the devices you like to use, the locations you like to shop and the things you like to buy.
Principle #3: Genuine
Genuine
We want our users to see us as a trusted friend. We are always honest with our users and ourselves.
We believe it is fundamental to the success of our company and product to develop long-term and meaningful relationships with our users. In order to do this they have to trust us. In order for them to trust us, we have to be honest. Honesty needs to be present in all of our design decisions: how we celebrate user successes, how we introduce new features, and even how we expose terms & conditions.
Also, to develop relationships with our users we unfortunately have to ask for a lot of information from them. Our features often require contact information, passwords, payment methods, location services, access to notification channels and more. If we want users feeling okay about giving us this information, we have to be holding up our end of the bargain by not taking advantage of them.
Principle #4: Bold
Bold
We are intentional and confident. Our experiences are unambiguous and present a clear path forward to our users.
Users don’t like being hit with a lot of information and choices at once. They are busy, distracted and have better things to do than try to figure out how to use our product. It is our job to figure out what is important, what they really need to know to accomplish their goal and present it in a manner that is easy to process and take action on.
The idea of being bold informs our choices around layout, color, typography, illustration, animation and copywriting, but can also extend to a world without “traditional” interfaces.
Next Steps
Defining a set of UX design principles (seamless, personal, genuine, and bold) is merely a first step on a longer journey. While we have a visible target, there is no guarantee we will hit the mark all of the time. The important thing is we now have a set of foundational guidelines to share and hold ourselves accountable to.
We believe the process of establishing a set of core principles isn’t isolated to design teams. Engineering, executive and other teams can all take advantage of the principle-creating process, and we hope ours serve as an inspiration.
Find Inspiration
Here are a few resources to learn more about UX design principles:
- “Design Doesn’t Scale” by Stanley Wood
- “Redesigning Pinterest, block by block” by Andreas Pihlström
- Gov.uk design principles
- “Creating Great Design Principles: 6 Counter-intuitive Tests” by Jared Spool
- “Building a Visual Language: Behind the scenes of our Airbnb design system” by Kaari Saarinen
- Design Systems by Alla Khomatova (pp. 34–44)
- “Design Principles Behind Great Products” by Anton Badashov
- “A Matter of Principle” by Julie Zhuo
