CloudZero Product Design & Enhancements

Designing for flexibility
& accessibility.

We helped a cloud cost optimization platform align with its new brand and users’ needs.

  • Experience Strategy

    We evaluate internal perceptions, user goals and best practices to find that “special sauce” that drives an actionable roadmap for your future experience.

  • UX Audits

    Conducted by seasoned experts in the patterns of human behavior, these assessments create a tailored roadmap of suggested improvements to your user experience.

  • Accessibility Audits

    We make accessibility easy — from the early stages of design through final development, we ensure the latest compliance standards are always top of mind.

  • Competitive Analysis

    See where you shine, where you don’t, and how to leverage that intel to fill the most important gaps in your experience.

  • Visual Design

    Through imagery, messaging, color and typography, we deliberate over pixels, consistency, readability, contrast, accessibility and creativity.

  • Functional Specifications

    Converting your designs into well-documented specifications with functionality, flows, layout, and styles ensures that no developer has to guess what comes next.

  • Design Systems

    Good design will translate to a good design system — and vice versa. Build your brand with well-defined styles and components at the heart, and it will grow and breathe well.

The Challenge

Cloud computing is mission critical for nearly every modern technology business. Companies can spend thousands—if not millions—of dollars each month for the cloud bandwidth they use, but it’s hard to know what’s working efficiently and what isn’t. And if a line of code or an application is using more than its fair share of bandwidth, the result is one very big (and probably unexpected) bill. That’s where CloudZero comes in.


CloudZero is a cloud cost efficiency platform that puts relevant, timely data at engineers’ fingertips to help them proactively manage cloud infrastructure costs and get more intelligence about their cloud spend.


CloudZero’s application was built for engineers by engineers. But as can happen with an application that evolves quickly, sections of the application utilized different visual hierarchies and elements. This resulted in a highly functional but somewhat disjointed user experience as you moved from screen to screen. When CloudZero’s marketing team began a significant corporate rebrand, they realized it was an opportunity to update the affordances and usability of their app, while ensuring its visual design aligned with the new brand experience.

The new templates use a consistent approach to serve a variety of needs
The new templates use a consistent approach to serve a variety of needs

Our Approach

On the surface, ZeroDegrees’ charge was simple: act as an integrated part of the in-house team, create a unified set of patterns that users could easily identify and employ, and apply new brand standards across the various sections and components of the application.


Going page by page, element by element, we improved the experience and ensured its consistency. We standardized styles. We improved labeling and icon usage. We reoriented page layouts for greater consistency. 

Without changing requirements or functionality…
…we created an intuitive, consistent experience

Along the way, we uncovered a specific pain point with the existing application that we knew design could solve. Aside from the design of menus and screen elements, we realized some graphs and data visualizations had accessibility issues. For people who were colorblind or had vision issues, many of the graphs and dashboards that communicated important business intelligence were difficult to read.


Leveraging the new brand standards, ZeroDegrees did a thorough study of color patterns and developed a highly orchestrated palette that would work for people with vision issues. Even if you couldn’t distinguish between hues of color, we presented the color values in ways that the contrast ensured readability.

A new system for data visualization, beautiful and readable for all
A new system for data visualization, beautiful and readable for all
The application design system: a clear, accessible extension of the new brand
The application design system: a clear, accessible extension of the new brand

The Results

For CloudZero, consistency became king. By creating flexible, unified components, developers now had a codified system they could easily leverage for future development and system updates. And the more requirements they brought us, the more we saw just how well the system worked.

Overall, we ensured that data was being clearly communicated. And we were particularly proud of some unsolicited feedback from one of CloudZero’s own color-blind employees: “Awesome, I can finally read the graphs.”

ZeroDegrees was the absolute right partner at the right time for CloudZero.

The launch of our new analytics product, combined with our corporate rebranding, created a compelling event to improve and standardize the user experience of our SaaS platform. Unfortunately, we were short staffed. ZeroDegrees stepped in and immediately had a big impact, with a streamlined on-boarding process and fast time to value. Providing an elegant user experience can be a challenge particularly given the large number of engineers that use our platform and the large volumes of data we manage. ZeroDegrees stepped up to that challenge and over delivered on our expectations. We would not hesitate to partner with them again!

Phil Pergola CEO, CloudZero