15 web design secrets from the world's biggest brands

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Big companies – those with millions (if not billions) of users – tend to have complex problems that attract some of the best talent the market has to offer. The bigger the company, the bigger the challenge. But bringing together so many brilliant minds also provides an opportunity to do great things.

When it comes to shaping our online experiences, big companies have proven to be very influential in recent years, offering disruptive user experiences, new ways of loading and displaying content, and elegant approaches to getting the users where they want to go. That’s what happens when your teams are at the top of their game. 

We spoke to designers from these brands to explore how they present their products to users, and the processes that have led them to design success.

01. Be humble

Cap Watkins, BuzzFeed

"Be humble about your work. That’s really what it all comes down to. A lot of designers do a project and try to keep it to themselves until it’s perfect, or reject feedback because it’s not what they had in their mind.

The goal of the BuzzFeed design team is to let the content shine through

"Being humble allows for the possibility that your design choices may be wrong, and opens you up to receiving feedback and information from your coworkers, users, people in other departments, and so on. It’s probably one of the most important traits for anyone – designer or not – when it comes to producing great work."

02. Create a community

Nick Myers, Fitbit

"Our organisational structure helps designers have more impact and be more efficient. Many internal design teams are centralised, but the Fitbit UX team’s designers are integrated across product development. This means, typically, that members of the design team sit with members of product and engineering to collaborate directly on a specific feature or platform element.

Designers and engineers sit together at Fitbit

"This means designers can be more focused, as opposed to multitasking in a centralised agency-like model. They also have more input on product strategy and can see the work through to launch, so it’s generally a lot more rewarding. We work hard to help designers feel like part of the community by assigning design managers to support teams in clusters."

03. Share early and often

Sam Horner, Netflix

"The Netflix design team starts by ideating concepts, and uses a blend of speaking with users and live data to develop them. These insights allow us to build stronger ideas, unbounded by opinion or bias, and design wholly focused on our users.

In Netflix’s 2015 redesign, major alterations were made to the UX, based on years of research

"We share early and share often, encouraging everyone on our team to have a voice. No single person has control over what gets created, empowering designers with ownership over their work. Our flat team structure means designers are consulted by others based on their skills, not their title. Netflix doesn’t impose any processes on our designers, we simply give them access to the resources they need to create great TV experiences."

04. Learn to improve

Garlon Cheung, BBC

"At the BBC the audience is at our core, so gaining insights and testing is important. Because of diverse audience needs, every team works in different ways to achieve this, but the overall mentality is learning to improve. This means making design decisions backed by evidence. It’s vital we use both quantitative and qualitative research to understand what people do and why they do it.

BBC sites such as the iPlayer are the result of thorough research into audience needs

"New methods appear frequently and teams experiment to see what is effective and what isn’t. We’re constantly improving how we collaborate and broadening our skillset. A big organisation like ours needs great communication and great people, so we give them the freedom to be the best at what they do."

05. Be inclusive

Ashleigh Axios, Automattic

"Automattic is a distributed company, with people in 51 countries around the globe unifying around the single goal of making the web a better, more equitable place. We believe that open source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation and that collaboration leads to innovation. We share as many of our ideas, resources and code with the world as we can, priding ourselves on our inclusiveness.

With employees all over the world – in 51 countries – communication is key at Automattic

"We Automatticians also have a hunger to learn from our peers, products and users. We’re an incredibly flat company – we believe ideas can come from anywhere and recognise that our results are better when we treat each individual as a catalyst for much-needed change."

06. Mix it up

Netta Marshall, Airbnb

"We have a team dedicated to creating tools for designers, as well as an expansive Design Language System, and an internal tool called Airshots that allows us to quickly and easily see what everyone else is designing. Since designers are embedded into sub-teams and sit with cross-functional members, this tool gives us visibility into what designers on other teams are focusing on.

AIrbnb’s Design Language System is just one of a suite of tools created for the designers at the homestay network

"Being in close proximity to non-designers is useful for picking up new skills as well. If you want to learn to code, prototype, analyse data or research, there’s someone who’s more than happy to sit down and share their knowledge with you. As a designer, being open to different perspectives as a default is great when you’re designing for such an international audience."

07. Understand the problem

Fiona Yeung, Google

"UX design is an iterative, collaborative and ongoing process that involves many different people along the way. My first step in any design project is to understand the problem as well as who the target users are and what they want. It’s our responsibility to understand why we are designing something first, before we can jump right in. 

Design staff at the search giant share work often

"On my team at Google, we like to create use cases and personas, starting off with low-fidelity mockups in the early stages before moving on to hi-fi designs to demonstrate and test our ideas, catching any gaps in our solutions."

08. Open up your processes

Nick Myers, Fitbit

"One critical stage in our process is the group design critique. Each week, two design teams share work with the rest of the designers and researchers. The session is carefully facilitated to get the most out of the time together. 

The Fitbit team are very open with each other when solving design problems

"A team shares the problem they’re trying to solve, the design solution, the users they’re designing for and where they are in the process. They also share the feedback they’re looking for from the rest of the team. After any clarifying questions have been asked, the team offers silent feedback via Post-It notes. The presenting team reviews the notes and open discussion happens around the bigger topics. We’ve evolved the process over many years and continue to refine it as the team has grown.

"The session helps the larger team participate in projects across Fitbit. Any system inconsistencies that may arise can be resolved. A lot of productive discourse happens in this session in a way that challenges the team. Most of all, the feedback is additive and helps the team push their work further than they would have on their own."

Next page: Top insights from designers at Twitter, Shopify and Etsy 

09. Rethink critique

Kurt Varner, Dropbox

"Design critique. Such a loaded term, and one that is filled with nuance and sits differently in the mind of almost every designer. At Dropbox, we recently revamped our feedback process to align expectations and increase its effectiveness. While seemingly obvious, each piece was thoughtfully crafted to meet the needs of our team.

At Dropbox, critique meetings are referred to as ‘design sessions’, to remove negative connotations

"First, we’ve relabelled them ‘design sessions’ to remove negative connotations. We problem-solve together to increase idea generation and reduce the expectation that a single designer can create the perfect solution. We don’t anchor things to a TV: designers use printed flows, Post-Its, sketches, whiteboarding and so on. 

"There are three one-hour sessions per week, and this helps to keep the time between feedback loops short. We also keep the team size small, inviting only the people with the right context, and ensure there’s a low barrier to entry – no presentation needed – to encourage feedback early and often."

10. Focus on feedback

Alexander Mayes, Facebook

"For me, the single most important part about being a designer in any design process is knowing how to give and receive feedback. Yeah, yeah, in my head I say it too – ‘That’s so clichéd, we get it: Pick your battles, have thick skin, don’t be attached to your work…’ But even at a place like Instagram and Facebook, it’s something that is valued above most things. 

Feedback is key at Facebook

"It’s something that is so ingrained in our design process that there’s literally no way to not be excellent at it. To move ahead you have to be great with relationships and there’s nothing more challenging to your relationships, as a designer than your ability to give and receive feedback. Honestly, it’s something that – even after typing all that – I can say I still struggle with at times."

11. Know your customers

Randy Hunt, Etsy

"It’s not about you; it’s about someone else. Call them user, customer, prospect, audience, or simply person. When they are similar to you, it’s reasonable to think it’s about you. Either you’re wrong, or you’re right but won’t continue to be as your audience grows. If you don’t know who ‘they’ are, what their motivations are, and what’s important to them, what are you doing to learn and continue learning?"

Imagine your customer as someone different to you, says Hunt

12. Encourage ownership

Serena Ngai, Shopify

"I lead a design team at Shopify focused on our third-party partner and developer ecosystem. At the beginning of the year, I realised that our usual process wasn’t working any more. Our ecosystem was rapidly growing and our UX team was trying to accomplish too much. We weren’t achieving the quality we expect at Shopify, and we didn’t have time to go deep into finding solutions.

At Shopify, each designer becomes an expert in their domain

"Our new process focuses on product themes: bringing together teams and projects that share similar goals and technical stacks so that each designer becomes an expert on a certain domain. This inspires a sense of ownership within the team, and empowers us to influence priority and scope of project. Most importantly, it also gives us time to focus so we can create experiences and quality we are truly proud of."

13. Don’t design alone

Malthe Sigurdsson, Stripe

"You should almost never design for or by yourself – you’re a sample size of one, you’re biased, and it’s a big world out there. This is doubly true for a product like Stripe, which is used by hundreds of thousands of businesses of all shapes and sizes, from cattle companies in Nebraska to app developers in Cairo. 

Stripe serves so many diverse clients, talking to others is key

"The solution is – as is often the case in life – communication. Talk early, talk often, and talk to a lot of your users. Obtaining a deep understanding of what they’re really trying to do will help you design a truly helpful product."

14. Adapt your approach

Nick Myers, Fitbit

"It’s hard to use just one approach across hardware and software with such a diverse set of features as at Fitbit. Designing for hardware requires rigorous planning and up-front design exploration over a long timeframe. If we’re designing feature updates or clearly defined new features, the process tends to be simple and straightforward and work within a standard agile approach. 

Designing for hardware requires rigorous planning and up-front design exploration

"Most fascinating are the features we design that are completely new and push us into the unknown. In these cases, I advocate we build-to-learn, as it’s very difficult to predict how design solutions will fare when people interact with them over a long period of time.

"Ultimately, we’re trying to help people live healthier, more active lives. Changing behaviour is complex, so the effectiveness of a design often doesn’t become clear until we see outcomes in the real world."

15. Keep consistent

Ashlie Ford, Twitter

"When a large group of designers is solving disparate challenges for an array of products, it’s no surprise that consistency becomes a challenge itself. To solve this, we’ve established a design system of reusable styles, components and patterns.

A consistent design system makes life easier for everyone

"The design system provides a shared vocabulary that helps teams seamlessly develop within the same product ecosystem and at a much more rapid pace than before. Since design and engineering develop system elements once, this lets teams spend more time on the user problem, rather than on the building blocks of the system."

Illustration: Elly Walton

This article originally appeared in net magazine issue 290; buy it here!

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