Vistaprint // Consumer North Star Vision
Project:
First positioned as a small business owner-focused company, Vista's growing offerings in Wedding Stationery, Christmas Cards and other consumer-facing products needed a digital experience that not only is able to cater to the needs of that market but also matched the visual aesthetics of its competitors.
Opportunities:
Shorten the DFF flow by grouping selectors according to specific moments of the consumer journey.
Allow consumers to bypass advanced options that introduce UNNECESSARY complexity for their use case.
Engage consumers with imagery, contextual narratives
and user-generated content.
Context and Evidence:
Vistaprint’s consumer experience had gradually inherited complexity from tools and flows designed for small businesses and power users. While that depth served frequent creators well, usage patterns showed a growing segment of consumers who were mobile first, infrequent, and primarily motivated by speed, clarity, and confidence rather than customization.
Data and qualitative insights pointed to a mismatch. Consumers were encountering unnecessary friction early in the journey, especially on mobile, where decision fatigue and dense tooling led to drop off. This North Star vision was grounded in those signals, reframing the experience around simplifying choices, reducing cognitive load, and helping users feel successful quickly.
Rather than designing a single experience to serve all audiences equally, this work intentionally prioritized consumer needs, using evidence to guide what to remove, what to simplify, and where visual expression could replace complexity without sacrificing quality.
Our first goal was to establish a new visual language for the areas of the site that were more consumer friendly vs the Business aesthetic of the rest of the site.
From left (top) to right (bottom): live wedding page 2021 and North Star concept
The resulting North Star focused on a mobile forward, confidence driven experience that emphasized clarity, momentum, and emotional reassurance over depth of tooling.
Our biggest focus was on mobile.
We created a simple flow that bypassed the advanced flows in our current studio. We tested and focused on mobile because thats where most customers start. They are forced into the desktop experience because our advanced studio in mobile is difficult to navigate. You can see in the mocks we allowed for the ability to go into advanced. We also created an alert that tells users that it would be better to continue on desktop.
These were some of the major features and improvements.
