Cimpress OPEN

Once the Columbus Project enhanced the number of products Cimpress could fulfill, as well as the design/UX to support them, the company saw a huge opportunity to expose these capabilities outside of our walls to the larger market via on open software platform. Effectively we wanted to become the AWS of mass-customization and create a new market across this platform for companies of all sizes.

Noticing the scope and complexity of this endeavor, I began to work with our VP of Corporate Strategy to help define this platform, sketch out/prototype its form, and generally ensure that this explosion of capability didn’t lead to an explosion of user problems.

To help mitigate my concerns, I took over and unified documentation for the platform and hired UX designers and copywriters to work with each of our software teams. The goal was to locally improve the UX and documentation of individual groups and their consoles, while sketching out a broader solution that integrates their work into a seamless platform experience for the user. We created a design system which included a style guide/component libraries that teams could easily integrate into their projects, as well as smoothing out the work flow for creating their documentation. We also prototyped the user experience from landing at open.cimpress.io all the way to integrating various sales/design/fulfillment functions onto the platform.