Standardizing UX at Scale: How Agoda Developed Its Experience Principles

What are Agoda’s experience principles and why do they matter?

Creating a seamless, intuitive, and trustworthy user experience is at the core of Agoda’s design philosophy. As a global travel platform, Agoda serves millions of users across different markets and languages, each with unique needs and expectations. Ensuring consistency and usability across our products is crucial to providing a frictionless experience.

As the design team at Agoda expanded, we faced a critical challenge: how do we standardize what “good UX” means at Agoda? Without a shared framework, we unintentionally accumulated design debt and introduced inconsistencies into the user experience.

To address this, we established Experience Principles — a shared foundation to guide consistent decision-making, foster a collective commitment to how we design and build products, and adopt a more customer-centric perspective on our product.

This article explores how Agoda’s Experience Principles were developed, and how they shape the way we design products.

How did we create the principles?

These principles were developed through a comprehensive process involving multiple rounds of team discussions, alignment with product needs, company values, and industry benchmarking. The process included:

• Industry benchmarking: We analyzed design principles from other companies to understand how they are applied effectively.
• Brainstorming workshops: Multiple sessions with the design and product team were conducted to generate ideas and gather insights around what our principles should encompass, fostering a sense of ownership and commitment.
• Iterative refinement: Feedback loops and iterative improvements ensured the principles were both practical and actionable.
• Stakeholder alignment: We engaged with key stakeholders, including product and design leadership across various domains and the C-suite, to ensure the principles are relevant and impactful.

Agoda’s Experience Principles:

Let’s explore the details of each principle:

Keep it intuitive

Guide users to accomplish the goals they intend. Recognize specific intentions and provide clear choices, avoiding overwhelming them or blocking them from their goals. By building comprehension and emphasizing key elements, we promote autonomy.

1. Solve for the hierarchy of needs
   Identify the primary goal of each user journey and don’t hinder that.
2. Navigate seamlessly
   Ensure intuitive navigation and clear information architecture for users to find what they need most.
3. Build comprehension
   a. There is a clear visual hierarchy. The prominence of competing actions or information is considered.
   b. Make content self-explanatory. Show relevant information that aids decision-making at the right place, at the right time, and for the right audience.
4. Offer reassurance in user actions
   Appropriate feedback is presented clearly when users take action. Any errors are followed up by actionable instructions to correct them.
5. Reduce friction
   Simplify the journey by eliminating obstacles. Assist users to complete required actions with minimal friction.

Be a trusted partner

We rely on strong relationships and trust from our users to create a successful product. Build credibility and reinforce confidence with every interaction, making users feel like they are interacting with a reputable and dependable product. Foster a sense of loyalty that encourages them to return to us time after time.

1. Be accurate and reliable
   a. Make information correct and precise.
   b. Avoid dark patterns.
2. Strive for transparency
   a. When we have the information, present it openly with clarity.

Think holistically

hile our attention may be directed at addressing a specific intent or moment, for our users, this represents just one snapshot within the complete user journey. Zoom out and contemplate how our solution integrates, coexists, and impacts other parts of the larger picture. We craft focused moments within a harmonious journey and ecosystem.

1. Establish patterns
   a. Create consistent, familiar, and predictable experiences by leveraging existing design patterns as per Agoda’s Design System.
   b. Only consider reinventing the wheel if it significantly enhances the user experience. The new pattern doesn’t become a problem at scale when others adopt the pattern.
2. Think about the end-to-end user experience
   a. Going from flow to flow, page to page, phase to phase should be seamless for the user.
3. Think platform/product agnostic
   a. Design solutions that scale to other product verticals (e.g. hotels, flights, and activities.)
   b. The solution is responsive and can scale up or down without breaking or needing major rework.
4. Keep the vision in mind
   a. Solution brings us closer or helps to inform the North Star or vision defined.
   b. We build solutions that scale to the envisioned future state, i.e., design minimum viable products and velocity tickets intentionally considering where we want to go.

Solve for a global audience

We are a global product that serves users of various languages, markets, and abilities. As a foundation, we design for all abilities and cater to our demographics. We further enhance the experience by considering the different types of users.

1. Be inclusive
   a. Design for all user abilities and age.
   b. Ensure adherence to accessibility standards, e.g., color contrast, alt text for images, keyboard accessibility, etc.
2. Serve our markets
   a. Cater to the geographies we service and adhere to local regulations.
   b. Information is shown in a way that is understood by users in the markets we support. e.g. date format, iconography, right to left, or other complex languages.

How do these principles elevate our design quality?

By embedding these principles into our day-to-day work, we ensure that every product decision aligns with our commitment to quality.

• Design critiques: To reduce subjectivity in design critiques, we integrated Experience Principles into our feedback culture. Designers now complement universal design laws with these principles in their rationale, enabling them to provide constructive feedback and justify their design decisions more effectively.
• Handoff reviews: Previously, there was no checkpoint to review designs before handoff. To address this, we implemented a mandatory handoff review process using a custom Figma plugin called “ADS Lint,” which performs Design System checks. Reviewers use this tool to flag issues, provide recommendations, and tag them to specific Experience Principles. This tagging system helps prioritize feedback based on severity and ensures alignment with our principles. Alongside these principles, we also consider broader themes such as business goals and user needs.
• Accessibility checks: In addition to incorporating handoff reviews, we’ve enhanced ADS Lint to detect accessibility issues, such as color contrast, reinforcing accessibility as one of our Experience Principles.

After defining our Experience Principles and integrating them into our process, we’ve observed positive impacts on our design process.

• We standardized how we evaluate good UX. After incorporating principles into our Design Reviews and Critiques, 72.7% of designers agreed that the principles effectively assess user experience, and 81.8% felt they helped standardize the design review process.

We’ve significantly improved the quality of the designs we deliver. By conducting Design Reviews aligned with our Experience Principles, we reduced UX quality issues found in the handoff stage compared to the exploration stage by 171%. This means we prevented potential UX debts from making it into production.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Agoda’s Experience Principles serve as a cornerstone for creating consistent, user-centered, and high-quality designs across our global platform. By embedding these principles into our workflows — from design critiques to design reviews and accessibility checks — we ensure that every product decision aligns with our commitment to delivering seamless, intuitive, and trustworthy user experiences. These principles not only help us address the diverse needs of our users but also foster collaboration, reduce design debt, and guide us toward our long-term vision.

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