scale up time at ZIVVER

Embrace the chaos

ZIVVER is a fast-growing scale-up founded in 2015. It offers secure email and data transfer solutions.

‘Embrace the chaos’ was the company’s motto when I joined as a Senior UX designer. My responsibilities were to bring up UX maturity.

‘Fired up’ and ‘focused’ is one of the company’s values. At ZIVVER I worked with many smart driven kind great colleagues, and together we got a lot done. But we also put a lot of effort on things that did not take off the ground - because the company’s priorities shifted, the team structure changed, people coming and going.

There are so many fronts to advance in proving that UX can bring business value all through the organization, how do you prioritize?

How do you create sustainable UX processes where there are none?

Together with a medior designer who had also just joined ZIVVER, we worked hard in creating more user-centered processes and culture. Improving how we worked with developers, engineers, QA and POs was important, and so was the relationship with Customer Success, Marketing, Data and Analytics, and the rest of the company.

We run workshops, did presentations, found creative ways of socializing user research and feedback, and introduced design thinking and user-centered methods, like alignment personas, customer journeys, user interviews, service blueprints, a design system mindset, accessibility awareness, and facilitated the first design sprint.

creating a shared language

Creating value by become more user-centered in our language and processes.

Personas and Journeys

People were often referring to ‘the user’ to describe completely different types of users, which made it hard to write focused user stories or jobs to be done.

I run a series of workshops internally to map out what the understanding of users was within the organization. In the future, we could validate this knowledge with data, but in the meantime, we got closer to a common language.

The proto personas were still too incomplete to share throughout the company, but mapped on a ‘timeline’ helped us get closer to creating the right value for each.

We took the main personas and mapped their journeys.

One of the POs used the personas and journeys to create a way of tagging user feedback coming through Shipright that let us quickly see where in the journey users had the most issues. We could now write better user stories and jobs to be done.

Getting research off the ground

We did not have an allocated budget for user research or usability testing, but we needed to get to users any way we could.

• We started attending product implementations and super user trainings, making fly-in-the-wall observations, and used this observations to make improvements.

• We organized an internal focus group and a company-wide survey to make internal assumptions visible.

• A colleague had friends who are ZIVVER users, she organized interviews with them. We shared clips of those interviews and our findings - the difference between internal assumptions vs. user experience became more obvious.

• We created templates and guidelines for research, and started centralizing customer insights CES score, NPS scores, metabase customer support tickets data

• This generated enough trust from Customer Success to start an email recruitment campaign for more interviews.

Improving ways of working

Learnings

At ZIVVER I was lucky to work with many smart, driven and kind colleagues. Together we got a lot done.

Embracing the chaos is challenging and fun. Chaos is not always easy to navigate, but it is definitely full of potential and opportunity for great things.

To learn more about my work at ZIVVER,