Vistaprint Corporate Portals

Employee focused, for better self-service

A solid MVP that got to market fast—set the stage for smart innovation.

  • Personas

    Bringing your target users to life with personas that are rooted in research and crafted with strategic data and insights creates a clear voice to model.

  • 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.

  • Sketches

    When it comes to bringing ideas to life, the pencil is mightier than the keyboard. And much faster.

  • Prototypes

    If a picture is a thousand words, a high-fidelity prototype is the entire story. Bringing the user experience to life with a fully-interactive artifact is a low-cost, high-value way to iterate without the investment of code.

  • Responsive Design

    We design for the future on today’s devices. Every element is considered for every size display to create an ideal experience for all users.

  • Visual Design

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

  • User Testing

    To get decisive, actionable findings, we let users explore without artificial restrictions. We design our prototypes to accommodate this need, as a final product would.

  • 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.

The Challenge

Even in a digital world, business cards are still a business necessity. But dealing with small-run print jobs like employee stationery can be a big hassle for HR and office managers. Vistaprint had a solution: a comprehensive corporate portal that provided on-demand printing and gave employees complete self-service functionality.

Empowering end users to create and submit their own print orders through a intuitive portal
Empowering end users to create and submit their own print orders through a intuitive portal

Vistaprint had revolutionized printing, especially for smaller quantity projects. They’d built a robust infrastructure that gave customers virtually limitless options of stock, finishes, fonts and styles—with incredibly fast turnaround times. As they built out their new corporate portal, however, the questions quickly mounted. How much optionality should companies get? At what point does flexibility become functional overload?

They needed help understanding what customers value most—and figuring out how to make it all flow seamlessly. Fast.

Flows helped focus on the high value scenarios and personas
Flows helped focus on the high value scenarios and personas

Our Approach

This was a case of MVP to the rescue. ZeroDegrees decided to design a new UX for the portal that started with the essentials, enabling Vistaprint to go from zero to launch in a matter of months. This allowed them to get to market fast with a workable product, and learn what users were looking for in real-time.

The portal was simple, but powerful. For instance, a new employee could log on, design their own business card and send it off for approval, with just a few inputs. The company administrator was notified via email, could quickly review and approve the design, and the new business cards shipped in just a few days. While it was all super complex behind the scenes, our job was to make that complexity completely disappear behind a streamlined interface. 

A seamless experience through a process with many options and configurations. Famous rocker photo got laughs in the presentation.
A seamless experience through a process with many options and configurations. Famous rocker photo got laughs in the presentation.

By gathering feedback in market, Vistaprint was able tweak the MVP to provide the perfect amount of functionality users wanted. The real surprise? Many of their initial assumptions were wrong. Users weren’t looking for a broader catalog or more personalization—they needed a better on-boarding process to understand how the application worked. So, we helped them develop that, too.

The full journey was considered including onboarding and post order communications
The full journey was considered including onboarding and post order communications

The Results

A modern, compelling and intuitive commerce experience that is scaling seamlessly as we speak.

The team from ZeroDegrees was an exceptional partner

…in the redesign of our portal—a business critical application. Their expertise in creating user-centered experiences was clear from the design and testing of interfaces to bringing it all to life with solid development expertise. The results are a significant uptick in retention and acquisition—and ZeroDegrees was a major factor in that success.

Don Leblanc, President, vistaprint corporate solutions at cimpress