One of the biggest challenges for the design team at Booking.com is establishing a consistent look and feel when you have so many teams operating nearly autonomously. Unchecked, this leads each designer to create their own version of common elements such as review scores. This wastes designers’ time, leads to a muddled user experience, and hinders scalability of the product. My approach to this problem was to codify a set of basic design guidelines for the use of user generated content in the form of posters, handouts, and wiki pages. I printed this poster to a size of 24″x44″ and posted copies on every floor of our building. I followed up by meeting in person with groups of designers to explain the guidelines and answer questions. This led to increased awareness and usage of the guidelines. We followed up by building a flexible review score component so that developers could easily insert the correct versions of the review score with little effort.
