New Design Experience Now in A/B Testing

News & Information Creator News
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Hi Creators,

We’re excited to share that we’ve launched an updated design experience that’s currently in A/B testing! This represents a significant evolution in how design works on Zazzle, moving toward a unified tool that serves both creators and customers.

What’s Live Now?: Our design tool experience is being tested, meaning users will see either the current experience or one of three new variants. This tool builds on the features you’ve been using including frames, grids, design elements, and our royalty-free content library, but is optimized to make design more accessible to customers who may not have your level of design expertise. Your existing post-for-sale flow remains accessible and we intend to improve those workflows as part of the next phase. 

Here’s a quick demo from Sean walking through the experience:

https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FTUMP-xSCJno%3Ffeature%3Doembed&display_name=YouTube&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DTUMP-xSCJno&image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FTUMP-xSCJno%2Fhqdefault.jpg&type=text%2Fhtml&schema=youtube

Why This Matters for You: Since this A/B test exposes templates to a new design interface, you may notice that some existing designs work differently in this customer-focused environment. 

As an example, to create a smoother customer journey, we’ve improved how “locking” works for layers. Previously, when you locked an object, customers could not unlock the object which caused usability issues when they wanted to make changes. With the new update, both you and your customers can unlock a locked layer. Note, if you originally had a locked layer, the “disabled” setting is automatically turned on with the update. Additionally, we’re using the locking feature to automatically hide certain layers, such as large transparent overlays, shields, or borders, that might otherwise interfere with customers trying to upload photos or edit text.

After the test concludes, we’ll be sharing tips and best practices to help your templates shine in this new experience to maximize customer engagement and conversion. 

Looking ahead, this optimized experience is the first step toward a cohesive design tool for everyone on Zazzle, designed to add ease for customers and positively increase conversion to benefit creators. We welcome your thoughts and feedback as you see this experience in action, as your insights help us build better tools for the entire Zazzle community. The team will be reviewing this thread so please weigh in as you’d like. 

Thanks for being part of this journey, 

The Zazzle Team

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This is fantastic. Congratulations on always being on the forefront of the consumer experience. I can see this change bringing in a greater number of consumers who may have felt intimidated using the previous design tool.

A marketing opportunity was missed on the video when there was no explanation of the origin of the design used in the example and that it is offered for sale by a Zazzle store owner.

Also a distinction could have been made that there are two options:

  1. customers can use the unique copyrighted designs on Zazzle “as is” by personalizing them with their information and assets using this new tool
  2. The new tool can be used as a way to take the original design and develop it much further for their own personal use. That would make the message more clear about copyright guidelines.
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Thank you @ElkeClarke  for your kind feedback. I’ll be sure to pass it along to the team :slightly_smiling_face: & the video was created meant to be shared with Creators. 

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 Thank you so much for creating this amazing, exciting, new standard for personalized Products. This new Software is intuitive. Congratulations.

I’m so happy to see this new format for customers.  It does appear to impact creators’ current platform. Even though  I use Adobe Products, I look forward to this new program to include creators. I  think I’m jealous!  I would love to be using it also.   It would cut down the hours of interfacing the initial setup and lead faster to  marketing which is crucial to any success.  Additionally, the customer and creator would be on the same page. 

Thank you, this holds great hope for my future structure and process as a creator.

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I do think this is MUCH more user friendly design interface. The other can be overwhelming and intimidating. 

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What’s interesting is, in this announcement video the “pop-up window containing the field label information text provided by the designer”  appears  - either as “Text 1”, “Name here!”, “Front - Line 1” and “Front - Line 2”, or “Text 1”, “Text 2”, and “Text 3” so apparently one version exists where customers can actually see the text labels. Although I haven’t seen it myself, this would help many customers and designers navigate the designs as originally expected, with proper instruction.

I did notice this version did not include the “edit” button for the images in each design. That is a different version which allows customers to change the image in the pop-up rather than clicking on the design (which may be beneath a frame, some versions do not seem to work without this pop-up, so customers abandon because they cannot change the image and think the design is flawed or the system is broken).

Based on the versions I’ve been able to test, I think we need a combination of these two versions (text and image fields with labels together in the same pop-up) so it works the way it used to, yet still utilizes the new interface.

In addition, please return the option to re-mask an image once unmasked, and regroup layers once ungrouped. Also, please bring back the color-picker eyedropper tool.

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I am not a fan of this new design element. I think it makes it more difficult as a seller to create a design. I can see how it could help the buyer of the product but as the creator I am not a fan and would like to go back to the old format. 

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Hi there. Could this be the reason some key elements of the design tool are no longer working properly? For example, I can no longer change the border color of elements. Instead, they remain gray. Clicking on the border color option causes the whole design tool to close out. 

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Thank you @zazzler1  - This is on our QA Team radar and they are working to fix. Thank you!

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Thanks, Heather! Everything is working now! :slightly_smiling_face: