UI as strategy

Problem Background

Zalando must comply with EU sustainability, consumer protection, and safety directives. To ensure compliance, the company must continuously monitor its 19 warehouses across Europe, as well as its international suppliers and logistics partners, including factories and quality labs. Failure to comply can result in blocked goods or financial penalties of up to 2% of Zalando’s annual revenue, which was €10.5 billion in 2024.

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Zalando’s scale means it is continuously impacted by new local and EU directives, like the “General Product Safety Regulations” that came into effect in December 2024. Each new directive means updates to key processes and personnel tasks across warehouses, safety laboratories, and factories. New regulations typically mean

• New user groups and personas
• New physical workflows that needed to be supported by digital workflows, e.g., identifying packages in warehouses quality control
• Support for new interaction types and interfaces, like scanner and keyboard interactions

These updates were handled reactively, with new teams created for each regulation or directive. Each compliance product was built from scratch, which meant a lot of time was spent on its design, development, iteration, and maintenance. Over time, the reactive approach stopped scaling, and the tech org struggled to roll out new products while maintaining the existing ones. Onboarding users like warehouse workers, laboratory operators, and managers took a long time, too: each user had to learn how to use multiple tools, and some simple tasks required them to complete long and complicated workflows. Some users even needed to switch between multiple tools to complete a single task!I was part of a cross-functional team assigned with designing a strategic approach to our digital compliance tooling. Our desired outcomes were to:

• Reduce the time it took to take new compliance products to market
• Reduce support/maintenance overhead of compliance products
• Reduce the time it took for users to onboard to compliance products
• Reduce the time it took for users to complete compliance tasks

Research

User Research

Our first goal was to understand all compliance tasks at a high level. We aimed to verify a simple assumption: all tasks follow the same structure. If this was the case, we knew we could apply the same application architecture to all existing and upcoming compliance tasks. Another designer and I spent a month interviewing internal compliance SMEs about current quality processes and Quality department leads about upcoming directives needing support.

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We synthesized our research and mapped our findings following the Jobs-To-Be-Done framework. We found the following general workflow:

1. Create tasks
2. Execute task
3. Review task
4. Take commercial decisions

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Thanks to this exercise, we verified our assumption. We knew we could create a reusable application architecture and identified where future applications would need customization.

Market research

After verifying our assumption, we needed to build a solid template for all future applications. We contacted all Zalando teams managing similar tasks, including those working on shipment notifications, communication with customs, and warehouse tooling. We also looked at competitor B2B tools like the Seller products from Amazon, Etsy, and Shopify. Ultimately, we weren’t satisfied with the solutions we looked at. The internal and competitor applications were either complex and overwhelming or lacked transparency. We knew we wouldn’t achieve our third and fourth desired outcomes (reduce the time it takes for users to onboard to compliance products and reduce the time it takes for users to complete compliance tasks) if we built similar solutions.

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We found inspiration from task management tools such as Notion, Asana, GitHub, and Linear. We liked that each tool provided transparency by allowing all users to track overall task progress through a modular form or archive log. We also enjoyed each tool's smart notifications since they let each user group focus on developments within a specific part of a larger workflow.

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We also found inspiration from check-out flows, which are great at guiding a user through a large task step-by-step. The IKEA check-out flow especially inspired us with its bold UI that called the user to act on a specific sub-task without distraction.

Solution

We felt confident we could achieve our desired outcomes by building a reusable application architecture for all compliance products. The B2B/B2E department that supports Zalando Partner-facing applications had a design system we knew we could utilize. We extended it to support more workflows and increase usability. We then created a “topology” of components that could be used for every product in the compliance domain, which prepackaged each product’s pages, layouts, and overall information architecture. The idea was that any product team could take this barebone “topology”.

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We knew compliance applications are task-driven, so we decided to make tasks the central unit of our solution’s information architecture. At a high level, the user would see:

• “Task Overview” dashboard page: where all users can see an overview of all ongoing and completed tasks
• “Task Execution” detail page: where all users can act on the ongoing tasks or review completed tasks

Task Execution contained most of the data a user would need to look at. To provide transparency and give users context, we drew inspiration from GitHub and created an archive log that showed users everything that had happened with a Task up to that point. The archive log was also useful in the case of a compliance audit!

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To keep the Task Execution page from being overwhelming, we added the ability to split Tasks into multiple Sub-tasks visible to specific user groups. We used the tab component to create this split so that we could reuse the same pattern in the Task List and, if necessary, the Task Execution pages. This meant our users no longer had to scroll through endless entries. Now, they could see specific task lists, call-to-actions, notifications, and badges!

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Finally, to reduce the individual Task complexity for our users, we created modulable flows so that teams could better tailor the experience to specific situations. For example, factory and warehouse quality inspections take place under different conditions. Many of the factories we worked with had to use Excel templates for their quality control processes due to internal restrictions. The collected data was then added to the compliance tool by a manager. In contrast, many warehouses had individual inspectors working directly within the application during the inspection process. With our system, it was easy to create custom dialog boxes with customized workflows for each scenario without having to build or maintain additional applications or UIs.

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Throughout this process I was in close contact with our users at warehouses, factories and laboratories across the globe, testing and refining our solution.

Results

Thanks to the solid base, we reduced the time to design and develop new applications in half, and Zalando was able to launch 4 new compliance products in the first 12 months. Users were able to rapidly onboard to new software, and the time it took for them to complete some complex tasks was reduced by more than half. (You can read more about how I helped increase inspection efficiency here.) Additionally, the pressure to build and maintain new products was significantly reduced, which allowed the tech org to focus on streamlining and automating processes like task creation and task review.