Zalando
How to keep customers first
In 2023, the EU Digital Services Act required all large online platforms to provide content safety controls.
For Zalando, it meant creating a new content reporting process from scratch – across the entire customer experience.
While the scope and requirements were defined by legal, we began by identifying the CX objectives.
A task without precedents
Only social media platforms had similar processes in place, but they were focused on user-generated content.
On Zalando, we had to include fashion assortment, partner brands’ assets, and our own content.
I conducted a detailed benchmarking exercise, combined insights from varied platforms, and presented them to design and legal leadership to define our strategy.
Identifying CX challenges
Through benchmarking and previous user research findings, I forecasted the main challenges that our design approach would need to address.
Then began solving them, one by one.
Brand risk
Balancing the conflict: legal clarity vs brand safety
Mapping each word we’ll use against the two needs
Workshopping which words we’d prefer, use if needed, or avoid entirely
Developing a lexical space, rather than rigid rules, to help localisation and scalability
Collab: Legal, Central Functions, CuCa, Design
Risk of misuse
Making it easy to discover — when needed
Creating a 1-word entry point only about the action triggered (‘Report’)
Using an icon supported by benchmarking and internal research
Creating a scalable, identifiable pattern, without disrupting the CX
Collab: Product Design, Product Management
Legal language
‘Translating’ legal language into conversational UX:
Distilling each category to explain users’ choices in simple terms
Using a Q&A format, with questions in second person (our voice), and answers in first person (user’s voice)
Framing choices as concerns (‘I think’) rather than legal-sounding accusations
Collab: Legal (Digital Law, Copyright Law)
Cognitive overload
Guiding users with progressive disclosure
Surfacing only the most relevant information at each step
Mapping the content design flow to calibrate across the journey
Setting sufficient context before introducing legal terms
Collab: Product Design, PM, Engineering
Bringing it all together
An intuitive, conversational experience that ensured safety and compliance.
Without compromising on brand voice and customer-centric design principles.
Setting up for iterations
We had establish a foundation and framework that allowed for fine-tuning based on A/B testing data.
I created principles and guidelines to enable junior designers to iterate quickly, as and when needed.
