Design principles: how content design can elevate the customer experience vision

In the latest installment of our Design Principles series, Principal Content Designer Jemima Leathwood-Hill shares her collaboration-focused tips to elevate design principles.

What is the difference between a UX Writer and a Content Designer? At Zalando, our word wizards do not only write user experience copy; they are integrated into the product design process as full-fledged designers. “We work hand-in-hand with product design,” asserts Jemima Leathwood-Hill, who has grown with our community for seven years. Her role as a Principal Content Designer in our central Content Design team brings her into close collaboration with multiple functions and teams. She leads the design practice, helping to define and elevate the customer experience in line with business goals.

A significant aspect of Jemima’s work is assisting teams in crafting design principles: “I’ve earned a name for myself as someone who can facilitate workshops, get everyone together, and write the principles when it gets to that stage.” One such success story was collaborating on the design principles of our Purchase & Post-Purchase Experience back in 2019. The six principles guide how to communicate convenience expectations to our customers, with the overarching goal of driving their satisfaction. As Principal Product Designer Joydeep Sengupta testified in a recent article, they are still impactful today, fostering faster alignment and better decision-making. In fact, they have been so effective as a ‘source of truth’ that there hasn’t been a need to revise them yet.

Actions speak louder than words

Jemima says that more and more product design teams are recognizing the benefits of leveraging content design expertise for this process. Her team is currently leading a design principles project that will influence an important element of the Zalando customer journey. “We are perfectly paired with product design in this regard. A misconception is that Content Designers are here to make design principles sound good. The words do need to resonate and make sense. But there’s much more in our bag of tricks. We are skilled at spotting themes, connecting the dots, and seeing the bigger picture. As my colleague, Chad Wright, Content Design Manager, pointed out, simply the act of putting something into words forces us to solidify our thinking. We design narratives and weave threads together to create one cohesive story. As we are a central team and contribute to many projects across the business, we can influence the collaborative process, ensuring all stakeholders understand what we want to achieve.”

“I find it really interesting for us all to puzzle the story together. We are all invested in its success.”

Having a core set of guidelines to benchmark options against is a long-term benefit of design principles. However, in Jemima’s perspective, the greatest impact comes from getting everyone together for open discussions on where they stand and how they want to move forward. “I find it really interesting for us all to puzzle the story together. We are all invested in its success.”

Over her years of collaborating on design principles, what learnings have stood out to Jemima? Read on as she shares her content design perspective on considerations we can all make when shaping our customer experience vision.

Five ways to elevate your team’s design principles

1 ) Turn inquiry inward

Like all product design endeavors, discovery is paramount to creating design principles. This phase does not only involve user research and competitor benchmarking. Since the users of our principles are our team and stakeholders, our exploration must also turn inward to our ways of working and our learnings from previous projects.

“The principles should be a translation of what we believe in. Being able to point to the source of each principle is key to helping people adopt and defend them. The first step of our current project was to discover the things that exist today that could help us make joint decisions in the future. For example, the team’s vision statement, customer jobs to be done, competitor benchmarking, and our success KPIs were all key artifacts that we knew could be distilled into actionable principles. We thought about all these insights in relation to the customer archetypes we want to appeal to — we call them Zalando Portraits. Building this landscape of where we stand today helped us envision our direction.”

2 ) Find threads and themes

Content Designers are no strangers to analysis and sorting. The next step is to sift through all the information we gathered. “Look for common threads that help you to create a story about what you want the customer experience to look and feel like. A great way to do this is by writing everything down and grouping themes together. This is a similar practice to ‘card sorting,’ a technique we often use to design and evaluate information architecture.” In their current project, it took Jemima and the team three whole days to sort the information into different buckets, generate keywords, and devise various formations. The process requires many iterations.

“This isn’t solely a design tool; it’s a tool we use as a product team.”

3 ) Consider adapting your language

For design principles to be understood and readily used by our wider team of stakeholders and executives, it’s crucial to make them accessible. Jemima suggests referring to them as “experience principles” to highlight that they can be used by all members of the product team. This puts the customer’s experience quite literally at the heart of the principles, which can heavily influence their scope and impact. “This isn’t solely a design tool; it’s a tool we use as a product team. We want other stakeholders like Software Engineers or Applied Scientists to feel comfortable using the principles. It is also possible they may not have worked with them in previous companies, so this definitely helps to get them on board.”

4 ) Seek feedback

As Senior Product Designer Xen Szymczak pointed out in the first article of our design principles series, including our stakeholders in the creation or review stages gives them a crucial sense of investment and ownership. This is mutually advantageous, especially in highly collaborative or complex projects. After all, how we align now influences how we will align on decisions in the future — like quantum entanglement for alignment!

“Seeking feedback from stakeholders and leadership before we finalize the principles is invaluable,” Jemima adds. “We want to show them what we are thinking of holding our solutions against. We can ask them if it resonates with their experience or knowledge.” She and the team have used this approach successfully within presentations, usually completing a minimum of two or three rounds to ensure they have integrated all the feedback. “The earlier rounds focus on achieving alignment on the core theme of each principle (e.g. Do we agree that this is something we want to aim towards? Are we missing anything?). Then, once alignment is there, we focus on iterating the actual wording to ensure the theme comes through as intended (e.g. Could A be confused with B? Does it feel actionable enough? Is it clear that this principle is speaking to X?). This has the added benefit of activating the principles before we officially launch them; people already get familiar with our goals and start putting them into practice. After all these days of hard work, we can be confident we’ve crafted a solid set of principles. ”

5 ) Put the principles in context

When it comes to formulating the principles, Jemima believes our first consideration should be making them as comprehensible and memorable as possible. Once again, let’s consider the user experience of our team and stakeholders. In addition to using clear and simple language, it is also helpful to put the principles in context by referring to real-life examples.

“I think of it like an elevator pitch for how we want our customers to feel during the experience.”

“Creating short, snappy, and even witty principles keeps them top of mind for people to refer to in conversation. It’s also a great way to onboard people to our project and vision. I think of it as an elevator pitch for how we want our customers to feel during the experience. Then we can add a paragraph explaining each principle and how it has been applied before.” One example is the Purchase & Post-Purchase principle, ‘Right time, right place.’ The explanation says the principle guides us to surface content based on our customers’ needs and journey rather than overloading them with information banners. “Adding context helps people to visualize and refer back to their related experience. They can then apply the principle more effectively.”

Are you getting ready to craft an impactful set of design principles with your team? Here’s a summary of Jemima’s advice. If you have any tips you’d like to share, we’d love to hear them in the comments.

Key takeaways

• Consider how your team and stakeholders will use the principles
• Be mindful not to rush the process
• Work out where you stand before you decide where you’re going
• Seeking feedback from stakeholders fosters later alignment
• Make the principles accessible, comprehensible, and memorable
• Help your team to visualize with real-life examples

Enjoying our Design Principles series? Ensure you don’t miss our next articles by subscribing to our posts at the top of this page.