Expedia Group’s Email Design System was created to aid in the reduction of inconsistencies and enhance template alignment across all brand emails.
Project overview
The necessity for a coherent email design system became apparent when our team was tasked with the documentation and overhaul of customer engagement emails for all of our family of brands. This initiative highlighted the crucial need for a standardized approach to ensure consistency and efficiency.
My role
UX design
Documentation & Training
Templates
User acceptance testing
The team
3 UX Designers
System Developers
Producers
Tools used
Figma
JIRA
Proprietary platform
The problem, explained.
Often, individual brands found themselves in a situation where they utilized multiple templates to perform similar tasks, resulting in a lack of uniformity and consistency. As a solution, it was determined that establishing a new design system and implementing a modular template system for producers to utilize was essential. This new Email Design System (EDS) ensures every UX designer and producer, will use the same components, colors, font styles, and layout, ensuring consistency and alignment within all Expedia group emails.
How it began
When starting the development of a new design system, its coexistence with the pre-existing global design system on the site needed to be considered. This entailed a comprehensive assessment of the brand guide, as well as the voice and tone guidelines.
As we progressed through the creation of our new email design system, we took an in-depth approach that closely considered each element needed for a new design system. This included an evaluation of the current and new branding elements (such as colors, logos, and imagery), content needs for components, and ultimately full email templates. The goal was to ensure a cohesive and visually engaging email experience for our target audience across multiple brands.
The modular approach
Recreating module assets and artifacts over and over again was not an efficient use of time. Therefore the components we developed within this design system were designed to be versatile puzzle pieces, offering the flexibility to create a large number of email templates. This modular approach allowed for a creative mix-and-match process, enabling us to efficiently generate an extensive range of email designs to suit our diverse needs.
Templates across brands
To streamline our production workflows and ensure swift weekly email creation, a suite of templates was created for production teams to readily utilize. These templates were specifically tailored to accommodate recurring types of messaging across various brands, fostering a consistent multi-brand experience while promoting seamless content sharing.
Post-launch
After a successful implementation of the Email Design System, the Expedia Group family of brands has been able to launch several weekly and monthly campaigns that have a cohesive look and feel between each brand while still having their key branding elements. Below are a few recent examples of the email system being used.
“I had the pleasure of working with Heather on building frontend experiences for travelers at Expedia on high visibility touchpoints. Heather is a fantastic, creative and skilled UX designer. She worked across teams, incorporated product feedback, created innovative designs and always delivered the design materials with the highest quality. She is an efficient designer who provided deeper insights in to user behaviour when crafting solutions. She was always easy to work with and was a big contributor to improving the overall product.”
— Senior Product Manager, Personalization, Expedia Group