Design principles: crafting a smooth checkout experience

In the first of our design principles series, Senior Product Designer Xen Szymczak shares how our Purchase team crafted empathy-driven principles for Checkout.

Behind every great product is a strong set of design principles. Like gravity, design principles not only keep our feet planted, but move worlds of inspiration in the right direction, and hold whole systems of teams in alignment. Every product design team at Zalando utilizes one or multiple sets of principles to optimize processes, make decisions, and standardize or evaluate their work across functions. Crucially, they help us to apply Zalando’s Founding Mindset to every experience we create for our customers.

In our new design principles series, we’re honing in on the principles established by diverse teams in Zalando’s product design community. How did they conceive them? How do they put them into practice? And what are their learnings or success stories? Each journey is unique and full of industry-illuminating insights.

This time, Xen Szymczak, Senior Product Designer of our Purchase team, gives her insight into the design principles she helped to create for the Zalando checkout experience. Forged by empathy, the five principles guide the team in cultivating trust and confidence at the most information-heavy stage of the customer experience.

Why Purchase needs principles

Zalando’s Purchase team focuses on streamlining the buying process. They save our customers time and effort, and give them peace of mind throughout the checkout, payment, and delivery journey. Xen led the redesign of the new checkout experience. The series of projects focuses on innovating our customer experience, architecture, and services, optimizing the checkout for new and returning customers, and improving KPIs. The Purchase team works closely with multiple teams, including the Payments team, the Gift Cards team, and the Plus team. In this highly collaborative and complex environment, design principles nurture alignment and champion customer focus throughout.

“Our team’s Checkout design principles help us to make the right decisions consistently since they draw from in-depth customer research,” Xen explains. “Whether we are considering multiple options or collaborating with different teams or functions, the principles ensure the customer stays front of mind and that any additions or changes will make an impact in the long run. We work with a contribution model where Product Designers from other teams can integrate features from their part of the customer experience into the checkout. A feature may bring a customer benefit. However, including it at the important final stage of the journey is not always the best decision for the customer or the business. Our principles suggest that extra information could increase the customer’s cognitive load and distract them while they are inputting or reviewing their order details.”

Crafting the principles

Before building a set of design principles, it’s essential to lay down the groundwork by answering the questions:

• How will they reflect our customer needs?
• How can we formulate them for easy adoption and application?
• How do they connect to our company values and the experience we want to deliver?
• Will they solve common issues and bring clarity to processes?

Xen’s team agreed that their Checkout principles should be clear and actionable, but they should not be hierarchical, exclusively used by designers, understood as solutions in themselves, or set in stone. The team conducted in-depth research, including an analysis of customer needs, usability testing, and competitor benchmarking.

Utilizing these insights, they held a workshop to address user needs during the checkout experience. “Starting with empathy, we played the role of customer and defined the feelings we experience when placing an order. We agreed that customers need to feel confident, in control, informed, safe and unsurprised. At this stage of the experience, they desire reliability, consistency, and simplicity. After the workshop, we formulated an initial set of principles. We shared the principles, and the research that went into creating them, with our stakeholders. Together, we tested and fine-tuned them. It’s an ongoing iterative process. We regularly review our principles to check if they still meet our strategy or if any changes could improve our workflow.”

The outcome of this thorough approach is a set of clear and succinct principles that are currently being applied across a range of projects and collaborations.

Our Design principles for Checkout

1 ) Predictability and Confidence

We avoid surprising or distracting customers at the moment of purchase. We use common design patterns.

2 ) Trust Over Convenience

We give customers the ability to control the flow. We are transparent if a change in the order is necessary to complete it. We do not misuse or alter our customers’ information. We respect their choices.

3 ) Secure

Customers should feel safe while sharing all their personal information, such as payment details, home addresses, or telephone numbers.

4 ) Effortless

Typing data will never be enjoyable, but we make it as simple and efficient as possible. We assure customers that we will not lose the data they provide.

5 ) In Context

We acknowledge that customers have different needs. We provide the right information at the right time.

A foundation for innovation

The focus, structure, and direction created by the Checkout principles have inspired new points of creative inquiry. Since the five principles were implemented six months ago, they have already become foundations for innovation.

The goal to communicate with the customer in a clear and transparent way, defined by the ‘Trust Over Convenience’ principle, opened up an important collaboration with our Content Designers. “They helped us fine-tune the descriptions of what is needed to place an order.” Following the ‘Secure’ principle, the team made a small change, an extra line of copy acknowledging customers’ need for more reassurance at this stage. “We inform customers that we use the latest technology to secure their data.”

The ‘Predictability & Confidence’ principle led the team to speak directly with our customers in qualitative user research interviews. “We asked them open-ended questions such as, ‘If you tap on the checkout button that leads you to the next step, what do you expect to see?’ It has helped us avoid bringing any unpleasant surprises to the experience, such as an unfamiliar screen at the end of the purchase flow.” On another occasion, the team discussed altering the order of screens in the flow in the case of incomplete information, such as a missing address or payment method. However, averting uncertainty, the principle helped them decide against such a change.

The Checkout principles are still relatively new, but Xen and her team are excited about the further impact they can make on the customer experience and business goals. Are you currently working on building your own design principles? Based on her learnings in this project, here is Xen’s advice on how best to approach the challenge.

Key takeaways

1 ) Invest in discovery

“Research is essential. Before jumping into creating your principles, ensure you have spent enough time understanding your customers’ needs.”

2 ) Ensure collective ownership

“Include your stakeholders in the process and create, or review, the principles together. If all parties have a sense of ownership and investment, the principles will be easy for them to follow.”

3 ) Don’t underestimate benchmarks

“Even after spending ample time doing user research, it’s useful to look into best practices across the e-commerce world. Shoppers don’t usually stick to a single store, and they have expectations when they enter the experience.”

4 ) Evangelize the principles

“Actively sharing the principles keeps them relevant and alive. Repeat them as much as possible during the solution design process or in meetings with stakeholders. Sharing a document and a presentation with each new stakeholder involved in the strategy or the solution can help make your convictions part of an ongoing conversation.”

5 ) Put your principles into action

“Ensure your decisions do not contradict your principles. Sometimes the principles may seem redundant, and you would much rather go with the design flow. However, collaborative projects involving many stakeholders or teams require a common understanding of guidelines. Especially in those cases, you will notice how design principles support key conversations and improve the work overall.”

How can product designers approach personalization in a conscientious way? Next, let’s look back on Principal Product Designer Clementine Jinhee Declercq’s principles for respectfully designing with customer data.