Case Study: Zift
My work led to an 80% increase in Zift’s customer satisfaction, and a 30% reduction in support calls.
Before and After: Modernizing Zift’s look and user experience.
Zift: Increasing Customer Satisfaction by 80%
What do Donald Trump, McDonald’s, and Bernie Sanders have in common? Like ‘em or not, they appeal to the common man. Zift did not make that list.
That’s understandable. Payment-processing is a thorny issue that many companies farm out to a third party. How could the necessary complexity surrounding financial transactions be simplified to accommodate the everyday business owner? I worked with Zift to update their user interface and user experience, so they could expose their platform to end users. As a result, customer satisfaction increased by 80% and support calls decreased by 30%.
The problem
Zift is a payment-processing platform, comparable to Stripe. They've been around for over 10 years, but their product had mostly functioned as a backend integration for large-scale applications. They came to Start Studio because they’d had requests to white-label their software, which would expose their UI to their customers' customers.
Zift’s UI had become a maze: challenging to navigate, and overgrown with extraneous features, all enjoying equal visual weight. If they’d encountered a payment-processing problem in the past 10 years, it was addressed somewhere in their UI. It imposed a sharp learning curve — one that took their employees months to learn. It could easily overwhelm the lay user. We needed to simplify the UX to increase usability, and decrease the burden on support staff.
Remember 2007? Zift needed a UI and UX overhaul before they could expose their interface to the general public.
The Approach
I worked with Zift to identify which aspects were most useful to their customers. We organized the information architecture, and streamlined the workflows to accommodate the most common use cases, removing features that were seldom used.
We took a critical eye in removing corner-case features, and simplifying the UI.
I created a set of wireframes to focus on the highest-value aspects of the user experience, while removing or reducing the impact of seldom-used features.
The updated navigation and simplified UI helped users understand where they were. They were able to focus on the most pertinent information for accomplishing the most common tasks.
After refining the UX through a series of wireframe iterations, my coworker, Josh Fowlke, crafted a professional UI that could be whitelabeled with their customers’ branding and colors.
The updated design modernized Zift’s look, and allowed for white-labeling.
The Results
Marc Roberts, who was in charge of the project, said, “Namon was very good to work with. He was detailed, responsive, and a good listener, which I believe allowed him to produce a product that we have been very happy with and will greatly improve our users' overall experience interacting with our platform."
Marc proved to be right. As a result of our work on Zift, he reported an 80% improvement in customer satisfaction. He said, “The new interface greatly improved their experience and also reduced support inquiries by 30%.”