Design Secrets From The World's Biggest Brands

Big brands like Facebook, Google and Netflix are shaping our online experiences and earning millions of users in return. Alex Duloz and Katy Watkins explore the secrets of their success.

- Alex Duloz and Katy Watkins

Big companies – those with millions (if not billions) of users – tend to have complex problems that attract some of the best talent the market has to offer. The bigger the company, the bigger the challenge. But bringing together so many brilliant minds also provides an opportunity to do great things.

When it comes to shaping our online experiences, big companies have proven to be very influential in recent years, offering disruptive user experiences, new ways of loading and displaying content, and elegant approaches to getting the users where they want to go. That’s what happens when your teams are at the top of their game. We spoke to designers from these brands to explore how they present their products to users, and the processes that have led them to design success.

Be humble

Cap Watkins, BuzzFeed

Be humble about your work. That’s really what it all comes down to. A lot of designers do a project and try to keep it to themselves until it’s perfect, or reject feedback because it’s not what they had in their mind. Being humble allows for the possibility that your design choices may be wrong, and opens you up to receiving feedback and information from your coworkers, users, people in other departments, and so on. It’s probably one of the most important traits for anyone – designer or not – when it comes to producing great work.

Create a community

Nick Myers, Fitbit

Our organisational structure helps designers have more impact and be more efficient. Many internal design teams are centralised, but the Fitbit UX team’s designers are integrated across product development. This means, typically, that members of the design team sit with members of product and engineering to collaborate directly on a specific feature or platform element.