REPORTING CONTENT ON ZALANDO
Balancing legal requirements, brand safety and customer needs.
By applying user-centred content design principles.
(And making friends with legal along the way.)
(Re)defining the goals
In 2023, the EU Digital Services Act required us to create a content reporting process.
While the scope and requirements were defined by legal, we began by identifying the CX objectives.
Searching for precedents
I led a detailed benchmarking exercise, gathered insights, and presented them to design and legal leadership to define our approach.
Spotting trouble
Analysing the benchmarking and user research, I forecasted the challenges that our design approach would need to address.
Weighing words
Balancing the conflict: legal clarity vs brand safety
Mapping each word we’ll use against the two needs
Workshopping which words we’d prefer, use if needed, or avoid entirely
Developing a lexical space, rather than rigid rules, to help localisation and scalability
Collab: Legal, Central Functions, CuCa, Design
Starting simple
Making it easy to discover — when needed
Creating a 1-word entry point only about the action triggered (‘Report’)
Using an icon supported by user testing
Creating a scalable, identifiable pattern, without disrupting the CX
Collab: Design System, Product Management
Turning formal to normal
‘Translating’ legal language into conversational UX:
Distilling each category to explain users’ choices in simple terms
Using a Q&A format, with questions in second person (our voice), and answers in first person (user’s voice)
Framing choices as concerns (‘I think’) rather than legal-sounding accusations
Collab: Legal (Digital Law, Copyright Law)
Going step by step
Guiding users with progressive disclosure
Surfacing only the most relevant information at each step
Mapping the content design flow to calibrate across the journey
Setting sufficient context before introducing legal terms
Collab: Design, PM, Engineering
Bringing it all together
An intuitive, conversational experience that ensured safety and compliance.
Without compromising on brand voice and customer-centric design principles.
Built to adapt
I created principles and guidelines to enable quick iterations based on A/B testing and performance.
This helped us meet the regulatory deadline while enabling us to test and learn, cutting user queries by 80%+ over two fast-follow iterations.
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