6 holistic design considerations to broaden your business impact
Six members of Zalando’s B2B product design community share their tips on how to design with a holistic approach.
Holism emphasizes the importance of the whole and the interdependence of its parts. In the design context, it situates our decisions within an interconnected and evolving ecosystem of digital and physical processes, human interactions, values, and impact. Though the roots of ‘holistic design’ are said to extend back at least a hundred years, there is no doubt it has recently become a buzzword. The product design industry, in particular, is an example of how rapid evolution on all fronts requires designers to navigate increasing complexity. We are more aware than ever of how even the smallest aspects of our design impact, and are impacted by, our users’ lives, socio-economic factors, and the environment. Whatever our field of product design — be it customer, partner, or employee-facing — a holistic mindset encourages us to look beyond individual solutions and continually evolve our existing systems to benefit the customer and scale business. As such, a holistic approach is central to every great design.
Seeing the bigger picture is the bread and butter of product design at Zalando. In the B2B space, the second ‘business’ in the business-to-business sandwich encompasses the tens of hundreds of brand partners that sell their products on the Zalando platform. Whether our B2B Product Designers specialize in partner onboarding or marketing, logistics, or supply chain, they not only have to keep in mind the business interests of both Zalando and our partners. They must also consider factors such as integrations with other systems, sustainability, and the user experience of employees who spend their nine-to-five interacting with the interfaces and services they create.
Kalliopi Papadopoulou, Product Designer in our Connected Retail team — which enables brick-and-mortar retailers to sell directly to Zalando customers — quips that her impact “has tentacles everywhere, from the partner onboarding experience to the retailer experience, to logistics and post-purchase, to the shipping of a package.”
Holistic design is a valuable tool for every Product Designer. What are some considerations we can all make to deepen our craft, expand our value, and evolve the industry? We asked six members of Zalando’s B2B product design community to share their holistic design tips.
Design in the open
The wider the scope of our design, the larger our pool of stakeholders is likely to be. That pool may include different teams or functions from within our company, external experts and — as is the case in B2B at Zalando — executives and teams from partner companies. Involving a breadth of stakeholders in our design process from the beginning not only increases alignment. It opens us up to a diverse inter-contextual knowledge base — invaluable in the innovation space and key to holistic design.
Product Designer Sriram Venugopal and Senior Product Designer Hanna Sander are part of our Zalando Marketing Services (ZMS) team. ZMS works with brands, agencies, and publishers to produce impactful marketing campaigns. Their work is all about creating meaningful connections, and this also applies to their design process.
“This approach has allowed me to understand ground-level problems in multiple areas that I would have never been aware of otherwise — and crucially, how they influence the whole.”
“I reach out beyond my immediate network of Product Designers and Product Managers to consult various domain experts,” says Sriram. “This approach has allowed me to understand ground-level problems in multiple areas that I would have never been aware of otherwise — and crucially, how they influence the whole.” He recommends setting up a sharing group or task force of representatives from all the relevant spheres. “As well as communicating regularly, openly document all the decisions you make together and why, no matter how minor. Transparency at every step enables us to move forward.”
Put a flag in the sand
Hanna points out that, in holistic design, establishing a common mindset across functions and teams does not only involve aligning on a vision or collaborating on design principles. Having been instrumental to the growth of the ZMS influencer platform Collabary — which spans B2B and B2C — she says discussing with stakeholders how we can scale the product is essential. “Have a common understanding of how the platform should evolve and how the components work together. A modular setup is very important; when the next feature comes in, it needs to easily integrate into the existing ecosystem.”
“Since it involves complex interconnected systems, the environment we work in is bound to change and needs will evolve.”
Zalando’s Retail Core team, which drives our partner- and internal-facing wholesale business, thinks systematically about how the design approach of our partners and stakeholders fits into the landscape and builds state-of-the-art design systems that help us scale.
“We envision future developments, then validate or invalidate these ideas with our users, stakeholders, and peers,” explains Serkan Mutlu, Senior Product Designer at Retail Core. “Then we ‘put a flag in the sand’ for, say, ten years from now and define how we might start building toward that possible future. Since it involves complex interconnected systems, the environment we work in is bound to change and needs will evolve. Designing for scale requires flexibility. Still, this approach helps us create a tangible strategy so that we can start implementing solutions and crafting a minimum viable product.”
Envisioning the future is integral to holistic design, not only for growing our business, but also for raising the standards of our company and the wider industry in line with our values. The work of our Circularity team is an inspiring example of how working toward a vision of a fully circular economy at Zalando has begun to influence our customers, brand partners, and the fashion and e-commerce industries.
Strive for coherence
Applying a holistic approach means optimizing the user experience across all touchpoints. This is typically associated with B2C, but as Blake Morgan, author of The Customer of The Future wrote in Forbes in 2020, B2B is waking up to the benefits. The three key factors she cites as driving this new focus — omnichannel experience, employee experience, and personalization — are echoed at Zalando.
In B2B, a common way for our users to interact with our products and services is via portals. They may house multiple spaces where external users (partners) can collaborate with internal users (employees) such as buyers. “To provide a coherent experience for our partners,” says Serkan, “it’s important to have a good foundation of information architecture. It should not be built around the domains of internal teams — for example products, orders, or payments. Rather, it should be built around the users.”
This is something the ZMS team is also working on. “Irrespective of the type of partner,” Sriram explains, “we work to contextualize their needs and desires and surface the right information at the right point. We ask questions like, ‘Can we create a model that allows a brand-new partner to set up a marketing campaign from scratch without the need of any assistance?’. We try to keep interaction somewhat similar to the industry standard to minimize the user learning curve.”
Cater to diversity
Incorporating personalization relies on a deep understanding of the user. “We have partners of different sizes with very different requirements,” says Andrea Brinkmeier, Product Design Manager at Zalando Direct, the team that makes Zalando’s marketplace accessible to brands and merchants. “We need to do our discovery homework to ensure we understand them and cater to their needs.”
“In B2B our user personas are very diverse,” Kalliopi explains. “At Connected Retail, we interact with store clerks, store owners, logistics managers, and more. They all have different tasks, objectives, and goals that we need to consider. What I love about B2B is establishing long-term relationships with partners. I’ve visited them on-site, which has enabled me to get to know them and learn from their expert feedback.”
Indeed, whether we are designing in the B2B or B2C space, deeper research methods, including in-person ethnographic research, help us to illustrate the entire user context and build a holistic understanding of the environment.
Sriram adds that the movement toward more user-centric B2B design should have accessibility at its heart. “Just like in B2C, there are users with different abilities, so it is important to consider accessibility guidelines.”
Take a human-centered approach
The closer we get to our users, the more we empathize with them. A human-centered approach is central to holistic design — and great design in general. A holistic user experience is as fractal as a romanesco broccoli; even in the smallest parts, we can see the whole. Asking ‘how does this benefit the user?’ at every interaction or stage of the product life cycle helps us build a delightful user experience all around.
“We understand what our partners value and seek to deliver that through our products and services.”
Delightful design may not have originally been a priority in B2B, but the tide is turning. “B2B prioritizes efficiency and productivity, but seeing the human beings behind the businesses is paramount,” says Prachi Taneja, Senior Product Designer in our Fulfillment Design and Product Analytics team, which innovates logistics, customer care, core fulfillment, and B2B offerings. “We understand what our partners value and seek to deliver that through our products and services.”
The Zalando Direct team is setting high-quality standards by making our interfaces accessible and easy to learn for partners, for whom we know it is important. “They tell us they really appreciate our dedication to making their lives easier,” says Andrea. She adds that a great way to improve our interfaces step by step is by thinking about what tool or experience would ease the user experience if we had no technical constraints or capacity boundaries.
When working on the fast-scaling ZMS Collabary project, Hanna pushed to improve the user experience despite limited engineering capacity. “I created a framework and principles for UX and a collection of color settings. Software Engineers could pick up tickets whenever they had the opportunity. Over time, we replaced 300 icons and defined a common standard set of approximately 30 color swatches. It took minimal effort but made a considerable and long-lasting difference.”
Lift the view
Holism is as much about zooming out as it is about the details. Let’s cast our net of inspiration wide! “We can step back and look at solutions from completely different industries,” Andrea suggests. “For example, equity trading solutions and medical technology serve as great inspiration for how to visualize KPI performance and sales success. Gamification is also something B2B users can benefit from. For example, creating levels and gratification for training material or task list completion. Elements like this are another way to make the experience more joyful. They are more than a nice add-on and can give our partners a competitive advantage during the skilled labor shortage by raising employee satisfaction.”
Are you working on making your product design more holistic? Here’s a summary of our tips.
Key takeaways
- Consider and involve a breadth of stakeholders and other experts throughout the design process, including those beyond your immediate network
- Envision a possible future and work backward to create a minimum viable product
- Design for scale: create a good foundation of information architecture and consider how the ecosystem will evolve
- Strive for a coherent user experience across all touchpoints and people involved in the process
- Seek to deeply understand your users and improve their experience
- Apply a no-boundaries mindset: zoom out and get inspired by other industries
Next, seven leaders from Zalando’s product design community share their insights on how to lead teams through complex projects.
