Designing for all the days along the way

A wedding planning and registry platform

Zola

Product Designer

2021-2022

Product areas

  • Vendor platform
  • Invites & paper
  • Marketplace search & inquiry
  • Design systems

Skills used

  • UX/UI design
  • Prototyping
  • Product planning
  • Roadmap prioritization
  • User research
  • Product testing

Vendor marketplace

Zola provides a marketplace full of the vendors that engaged couples need to hire for their upcoming wedding. The vendor categories provided include venues, photographers, videographers, caterers, bakers, florists, bands, beauty professionals, and wedding planners. And every vendor listed on Zola has been handpicked and vetted, so couples can be confident about who they are hiring.

My role as a product designer

During my time at Zola, we created one of the leading spaces for engaged couples to find and hire their dream team of trusted and talented wedding vendors. I was responsible for creating a simple and seamless experience for both our Vendors and Couples.

Vendor platform

The vendor platform is a B2B product that is used by all wedding vendors on Zola, ranging from venues to photographers. It enables them to maintain their storefront listing page on Zola, connect with couples through the messaging tool, and set preferences for the types of clients they prefer to work with.

Couple's experience

This is the couples facing product, which is comprised of educational tips and customizable tools. Its main goal is to make hiring a team of wedding vendors easy by helping couples discover their style, set their budgets, and plan their dream wedding.

Couple’s vendor search & SEO optimizations

SEO is essential for bringing in the traffic necessary to create the conversion and inquiry volume necessary to make the vendor marketplace profitable. Advertising is one of the biggest experiences at most companies, with each click coming from google costing money. It was my job to create several SEO solutions for the vendor marketplace, all of which greatly increased traffic and overall engagement from users.

A core aspect of the couple’s experience on Zola’s vendor marketplace is the action of searching for a vendor. While very similar to the average e-commerce experience, the vendor search is far more complex and nuanced. With 10+ vendor categories, each with a unique set of price ranges, services, accommodations, and badges, it’s a huge challenge to help the user understand at a glance why they would want to book one florist over another.

To view full case studies for these projects, please contact me.

Couple's inquiries to vendors

Zola’s inquiry quality is one of the things that makes it stand apart from its competitors. This means ensuring that each inquiry coming into a vendor’s inbox is both from a real couple and contains the vital information needed to understand if this is the right type of client for their business. This requires couples to provide style and service preferences, budgets, dates, and a customized message to the vendor, which is a lot of information to gather in one quiz. By looking at user drop-off and through user testing, we were able to identify keys areas that created too much friction for couples during the inquiry process. Through optimizations and new features, we were able to greatly increase inquiry conversion and volume.

To view full case studies for these projects, please contact me.

Vendor platform & dashboard

The vendor platform is a B2B product that allows vendors to create their storefront and maintain their business on Zola. As the product grew with new features and tools, it became clear that a dashboard was an essential element that vendors wanted and needed. By restructuring the site to function more as an immersive experience, we were able to create a more robust product that empowered the vendors on Zola to successfully highlight their storefronts and generate business.

To view full case studies for these projects, please contact me.

Vendor inbox & inquiry conversion

The inbox is the space that vendors spend the majority of their time while on the vendor platform. This is where new business comes to them, and where Zola makes their money. Creating an experience with robust and easy to digest inquiries from couples was essential to not only encouraging vendors to use the platform, but also to entice them to connect with the couple inquiring about their services. Through rounds of user testing, interviews with real vendors, and the monitoring of engagement metrics, I was able to implement optimizations that would improve inquiry conversion and to create an inbox experience that vendors would love.

To view full case studies for these projects, please contact me.

Vendor marketplace design system

Shortly after joining the vendor marketplace team, it became apparent that there were specific use cases and components that we used which weren’t in Zola’s master design library. Instead of adding these components to the existing system, cluttering it for the other designers, I decided to create a branch of the master library that was specific to the vendor marketplace. It became my responsibility to monitor, maintain, and publish this library, which was ever-changing with each new project, tool, and feature we created.

To view full case studies for these projects, please contact me.

Case studies

Outlined above are a handful of products, experiences, and tools that I designed while at Zola. To view full case studies for each of these projects, along with others not highlighted here, please contact me.

Contact me