topic Re: Personalizing as Customer in General Zazzle Discussion

Personalizing as Customer

waterart — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:21:25 GMT

While logged out I went to see what it would be like for a customer to personalize a product. It is way to cumbersome and time consuming, just to edit text they are taken into the designer page and when they are done they need go through several pages until they get to the buy page.

It was way easier and faster before where the customer could edit text right from the product page and if they wanted further customization they could click a customizing button. If I was a customer I would not bother with it and I'd just go buy somewhere else.

Re: Personalizing as Customer

Fantabuloustef — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 09:35:25 GMT

I strongly hope they performed beta user testing on cohorts of selected end users before choosing to put this in production ( and not on the live website) . I’m also very perplex about the customers who had been loyal to the site for a long time. Isn’t it too much change for them ? It’s difficult to change a site with both objectives : retaining loyal customers and attracting new ones. When I was working in the industry years ago, we used to organize specific UX sessions with selected customers, they were coming in the company buildings for testing sessions, where they had tasks to perform based on scenarii we prepared before, and we let them work with the online tools ( deployed on our testing environment only ) as if they were in real life conditions. We were observing them and their reactions and their blocking points. ( often we made videos ) At the end, we asked a list of questions to understand what they felt during the exercise. And we had opened discussions about what to improve, and more generally their painful points in their real life that our tools could help solve. They were rewarded with some products or services or specific discounts. And it was really instructive. It was in very big companies, but I suppose Zazzle is quite big too… But Maybe I’m wrong.

Re: Personalizing as Customer

alissag — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 17:10:08 GMT

Is this something in Beta? I'm not seeing it on my end. There's a button to "personalize" that works like it always has where shoppers can but their text in any custom text fields we've set up. There is a button to "edit this product" which goes to the design tool for those who want to do more involved custom stuff. But this was all on a t-shirt. Maybe other products the personalize option is gone.

Re: Personalizing as Customer

waterart — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 18:36:36 GMT

I think it's not rolled out for everyone or maybe not on every product, I was trying it on a mug

Re: Personalizing as Customer

ColsCreations — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 18:48:55 GMT

You don't see the New Customer Interface (NCI) while signed in and viewing your own products. You'll only get it when checking out other people's products, or viewing your own anonymously.

This is one of my Announcement cards.
Here's the classic way I as the Designer gets with the template panel and the button to click to enter the actual Design Tool:

And here's what the NCI looks like to people not me-the-designer:

With the NCI there is no access to the classic Design Tool. While I have complaints, the NCI is growing on me, I think it does make many things simpler for customers.
Also, some product types, like Luggage Tags, don't have the NCI yet.

And P.S. to the Mods:
The top screenshot is from Firefox where you can see the issue with the mask shape edges. The bottom screenshot is from Opera which is not exhibitig the issue - it is displaying the correct way in Opera.

Re: Personalizing as Customer

Cat — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 16:58:01 GMT

I actually like the new customer interface better. I think it makes it clear (or at least clearer) to the customer that they are the ones doing the customization whereas before (judging from the comments I received from customers) I think a LOT of them assumed they were filling out a form to tell me how they wanted me to customize it for them. I also think that lots of people were intimidated by the idea of opening up a separate tool and never got that far, so they'd end up messaging me or contacting support for things they could have easily changed themselves (like background colors or fonts.) IMHO this tool is sorta the "best of both worlds" combination - it still has the form, but the design tools are all easily accessible for anyone who wants them.

I don't know what sorts of in-house tests they may or may not have run (like the ones @Fantabuloustef was describing) but I do know that when they were testing all of the various new interface options, a questionnaire would periodically appear asking you about your experience with the interface - not sure if it was just random or what, but I had some friends test a few things for me and several of them saw (and filled out) the questionnaire.

Re: Personalizing as Customer

ColsCreations — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 19:03:37 GMT

I like that once they click to Personalize and select the text they want to change, they get a very obvious menu right there to adjust the formatting if they want to / need to.

Before, all they could do was change the words; if for example their text was too long and it broke to two lines they either had to think of something shorter, or brave trying the "Edit using Design Tool" button and learn their way around that. It's so easy for them now to make the text a little smaller to fit, or larger, or make it a more contrasting color and etc... And in turn I think that makes it easier on Designers, less headache trying to setting up a template field that'll work under all the scenarios.

I know there are issues with some of the complicated layered designs using frames & masks & overlays, but for the most part, this NCI means the customer will rarely need to even access More --> Layers let alone need the old Design Tool (which they can't access anyway). This is much closer to a WYSIWYG editor and more intuitive I think.

Re: Personalizing as Customer

SheaPrints — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 20:01:48 GMT

@Cat @ColsCreations I agree with what you're both saying, and I think customers expect more flexibility to customize things these days. It's just so frustrating for designers who don't have access to the 'Replace Products' feature, especially when so many designs with proven sales could be easily fixed to improve the customer experience. Just my two cents!

Re: Personalizing as Customer

waterart — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 23:23:50 GMT

They could at least remove some of the extra pages the customer has to go through before they get to the buy page, customer needs to go through an options page and then a review page. I think that's a bit much for someone who just wants to change the text on a product.

Re: Personalizing as Customer

Cat — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 19:17:10 GMT

I suppose there's different schools of thought on that. I agree that it does require extra steps, but it also ensures that they actually see the options. That and the review process probably help to eliminate a lot of cancellations for simple typos etc. - which (in my experience) happens a LOT. For something that only requires a tiny amount of customization it's probably an annoyance, but for things like invitations, programs, menus etc. where there's lots of text and tons of choices (paper, size, cut, envelopes, etc.) there are just so many opportunities for mistakes, so I think it's good to force the customer to take a few more minutes to make sure it's right so they don't end up cancelling the order.

Re: Personalizing as Customer

Ricaso — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 07:32:58 GMT

I know it's only one, but a customer did take the time to message me about the new set up and say they love how easy the whole process of customization was compared to other platforms.