Behind the Scene: Creating Traveloka Designer’s Guiding Principles Interactive Book
Interactive books aren’t just for children. Through its interactivity, a book can have a better engagement with adult readers. This is a story of how we created one.
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to initiate and lead the creation of guiding principles for Traveloka’s designers. Watching the team evolve from one to more than 100 at the time, we realized that we needed to have something that guides us as a team during our day-to-day collaboration. Our team is made up of diverse individuals with different ways of seeing things — something inevitable thanks to our difference in expertise, experience, and business unit knowledge. There needs to be something that unites us together, a culture that is born from distilled principles.
With the various backgrounds that we are from, there needs to be a common culture we uphold to, born from designer’s guiding principles.
The principles for treating the principles
The principles act as a set of propositions that defines what’s important to us the design team.
It guides the day-to-day mindset and behaviors as a
designer in all circumstances, irrespective of variables in your life.These principles are not to prescribe our current state. They are what we
believe where we need to be as a design organization.Don’t be alarmed if, as you live the principles in interacting with colleagues, you might encounter conflicting perspectives. The principles are not a magic spell to abolish conflicts or solve problems, but they will be a practical guide to ensure that we respect one another and address problematic situations confidently.
Principles aren’t rules. They are our stance.
The challenges
Among other challenges, I faced these main five:
- Where and how to start?
- How to define the principles?
- How to define the format of the principles so the readers are engaged?
- Whom should I work with?
- How to get buy-ins from colleagues and leaders?
A question popped up in my head:
How to get creative in multiple aspects so we can really launch the principles?
Now, I don’t know which state you or your team is in, but if you’re planning to create guiding principles for your team, hopefully this article can serve as an inspiration.
The making and the approach
I started with creating a working framework for the creation, together with forming a working group, influencers, and contributors.
Principles Working Group
This is the core group responsible for the creation of the principles, including the overall concept and implementation of the concept. Also responsible for involving key Influencers and Contributors throughout the process. I decided to keep this group small, which consisted of five people including myself. I worked closely with these people in terms of brainstorming ideas for the principles, workshop facilitation, until the delivery of the end product.
Influencers
These are key leaders who are responsible for providing feedback throughout the process, and are seen as advocates for the use of the principles in their domains. They consist of Design Leads, several key leaders across functions and business units, and designer’s representatives from every vertical.
Contributors
This is the largest group of contributors from across the company who are responsible for providing feedback on what our principles look like in practice and in our work. They consist of the key leaders at the company. After the principles were formulated, we sent a survey to each individual to better understand our definition of principles in our works and for them to help as sounding boards on the principles.
Align our goals as a design organization
Now comes the most challenging part, which is to align our goals as a design organization in a business.
Through a series of weekly workshops, we tried to define our North Star, starting with this one simple brief:
Imagine a picture of what things are going to look like when we successfully arrive at where we’re going.
Then create narratives based on these 3 W’s
- What does success look like to our design organization?
- What do we want to be known for?
- What would happen to our users and Traveloka?
To align our goals internally for the concept and thinking behind the Designer’s Guiding Principles, we asked these 6 questions, visualized them through mind mapping, put them up on a wall, and revisited the answers weekly in the workshop with the Influencers.
1. Why do we need designer principles?
2. What’s our definition of design?
3. Who should benefit from the guiding principles?
4. What informs these designer principles?
5. When and where would these principles be used?
6. In which format should the principles take form?
Gut-check session
After getting all the raw ingredients — 22 themes and narrative ideas — through the weekly workshops, we began to ‘cook’ them into something more finished.
To prioritize the 22 principles, we did a gut-check session with influencers (designer’s representatives across verticals) and managed to get feedback from them.
How relevant are the principles? How realistic are they? How implementable are they in our day-to-day lives?
We also consulted influencers from multiple functions like HR, Brand, Marketing to gain their perspective.
Set up a “Gallery” to make the process visible and accessible by everyone in the team
We dedicated a “gallery” room which people can come in and see the raw artifacts. The purpose is so everyone who walks in can see the process behind the making of the principles, that those words don’t just fall from the sky, but it’s about mixing between top-down vision and bottom-up aspirations.
Through the process of synthesis, we narrowed down our principles from 22 to 7 by prioritizing those that are most relevant to day-to-day collaboration.
In parallel, we are sending a survey to the key leaders in Traveloka (from Product, Tech, Marketing, etc.) to answer a series of questions under a single theme:
What does being user-centric mean for Traveloka as an organization?
The purpose of this is to check how far the gap is between design and other teams in terms of understanding the importance of being a user-centric organization, and how it can be addressed through the mindset from the principles. We aim for designers to advocate user-centricity to outside design, because we believe that everyone at the company needs to care about it and it’s one of the keys to business success.
At the end, we also aligned the principles with the company’s values DICE-H (Dedication, Intellectual Honesty, Curiosity, Empathy, Humility).
Give shape to the principles
Now comes the juicy part. Remember that in the alignment process, one of the questions is
In which format should the principles take form?
We finally agreed to make a physical book out of it. Not just that. The book needs to be interactive too. We see this as an exciting project due to its freedom to explore and get creative.
With the working group, we did a series of brainstorming to ideate the concept of visual, narrative, and interactivity.
High craftsmanship
Because the book is interactive, it requires a printing vendor who is up for the challenge. Luckily we found one that fits.
The end result: An interactive book (for adults)!
Take a peek at the interactive book from multiple angles
Learnings and recommendation
- Pick the right roles for your working group. Since I wanted to keep the team small, I picked a design lead, an illustrator, a brand designer who is strong in creative direction, and a graphic designer who is good at print design to work alongside me.
- Set up a clear timeline, hard deadline and commit to it. It’s so easy to put this project aside because we’re busy with other daily responsibilities. Without a clear timeline, things would easily slip and get missed. This happened to us too, and we learned to improve on the go.
- Facilitate alignment as early as possible. Not only among the design leads and designers, but also with other teams and key leaders because as a part of the company, the design team should not live in its own bubble. Facilitate the alignment effectively. Ask the right questions, listen actively, accommodate multiple perspectives, build on top of other’s ideas, but at the end, be decisive in choosing the stance we opt for.
- Be clear on what’s expected of each contributor. This project involves many people in the team. Sometimes, one or two people aren’t clear about what’s expected of them, so define clear tasks for each, get back on track, and regroup regularly to check progress and blockers to address them.
- Get wild with creativity, but stay within budget. We learned that under some kind of limitations, including budget-related constraint, creativity can flourish best. Throughout the process, we let go of some ideas for interactivity that would have put a bigger stress on our budget, while saving those that effectively communicated our intent.
Thank you
As written in the book, special thanks to the people mentioned below — without whom — this interactive book would have been just another unchecked Asana task. Thank you for your dedication, support, and top-notch craft in making this work happen; The working group Taufiq Adhie Wibowo, Arganka Yahya, Astri Novanita, Lana Banatulhusna. The extended members: Bathara Putra, Pei Ling Chin. Supporters: Albert, Amelia Hendra, Antonia Fransiska, Khea Yashadhana, and last but not least, the entire design team at Traveloka (existing and former) who aren’t only generous in voicing out feedback and opinion, but also breathing the principles.
Curious to know more about the inner workings of Traveloka Design team? Follow us on Instagram @traveloka.design and tune in our podcast on Spotify!
Editor: Aulia Kushardini
