A laptop displaying the new Booking.com design system guidelines

One source of truth for guidelines and documentation

The problem

At Booking.com, our design community is over 200+ designers that work alongside in creating a seamless experience for all users from guests booking their upcoming accommodation, to properties uploading their availabilities in their calendar from desktop to mobile or an app. So how do we make sure that all designers don’t constantly reinvent layouts and interactions across platforms and departments?

My design thinking

Collaborating with one of our principal designers, for several months we worked together in writing down multiple documentations around guidelines for building partner facing products. I achieved this by doing research with already documentations created out in the outer webs. Listing all common topics that needed to be covered, did an audit of our extranet and added missing topics that separated us from other businesses guidelines.

Wrote first drafts on all topics, did a community design feedback session to revue if our communication was clear and easy to use. Collected all the feedback shared and did iterations to evolve thanks to their feedback and input. Once the drafts were covering all scenarios, we collaborated with our internal copywriters to sign off on our grammar and spelling.

The solution

I took the task to compile all documentation around guidelines for building partner facing products. To help the designers working at Booking.com, to reference in best practices, guidelines, localisation and more. All this was compiled into an internal website that anyone at the company could access and use as reference.

Who would this impacted

This helped all graphic, web and user experience designers. It also was picked up by front end developers across our global offices.

My contribution to the project

Building this solid foundation of one source of truth for all creative departments turned out to help all designers building a unified experience across all pages and devices. This also became a helpful tool for developers to reference and create an alternative version for themselves to reference in best practices of coding.

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