ZEOS Support Vision & Help Center

Company Zalando
Role Design lead
Year 2024 - 2025

Brief

Following the launch of ZEOS One, Zalando’s flagship multi-channel B2B fulfillment portal, I spearheaded the overarching UX design strategy for its brand new support ecosystem. Partnering directly with product leadership, I established a 2-year service vision aimed at reducing operational friction, protecting merchant revenue, and automating scaling inefficiencies. As the end-to-end design lead, I owned the problem framing, cross-functional alignment, and component architecture for the foundational ZEOS Help Center – a systemic infrastructure that now fuels all subsequent support layers, including ticketing, our developer portal and soon automated AI assistance.

Team

Design & User research: Ingrid Ho, Claudine Dizon Liljedahl, Oscar Fredriksson.

Product & Engineering: Sharareh Shrabi, Alex Satour, Nikhil Prabhakar, Daniel Sharkov, Tatsiana Dziarhai, Md Tonoy Akanda, Nikola Kalinov Mihaylov.

Jump to TL;DR

Background

ZEOS, Zalando's Ecommerce Operating System, represents a massive operational shift from wholesale and consumer fashion to enterprise B2B multi-channel logistics. For these new multi-channel merchants, minor platform friction drops fulfillment pipelines and instantly stalls revenue. As portal usage increases and onboarding of new merchants accelerates, manual support will not be able to scale proportionally and risks becoming a costly bottleneck. To ground our support strategy, I audited industry leaders to evaluate how our competitors bridge merchant enablement with automated troubleshooting.

The analysis revealed a consistent pattern: leading fulfillment platforms invest heavily in both merchant education and rapid issue resolution. ZEOS lacked a structured investment in either dimension. This clarified the opportunity for us: support needed to become a strategic, pro-active capability, not only a reactive function.

Capabilities	Shipbob S	Flexport F	Hive H	Amazon A
Help Center	x	x	x	x
University	o	x	o	x
Chat bot	x	x	x	x
Guides	x	x	o	x
Video tutorials	x	x	o	x
Forum	o	o	o	x
Webinars	x	x	x	x
Blog	x	x	x	x

ZEOS’ support capabilities empower merchants to resolve issues efficiently – ideally independently .

We strive to deliver a painless experience that inspires merchants, grows their business with them, that anticipates and reacts to their needs in every step of their journey with us.

Two Dimensions of Support

Together with Product and Design, I reframed support as a capability system structured along two axes: Education & Enablement; guides, video tutorials, courses, webinars — content that empowers merchants to grow, and then Unblock & Resolution; search, chatbots, forums, ticketing — mechanisms that resolve friction quickly.

Plotting competitors along these dimensions allowed us to:

Visualize capability maturity
Define a clear 2-year target state
Shift roadmap conversations from isolated features to strategic positioning
Create clarity and align leadership on ambition

Education & Enablement

Unblock & Resolution

A: Amazon
F: Flexport
S: Shipbob
H: Hive
Z: ZEOS

ZEOS in 2 years

ZEOS now

Three Horizons Roadmap

To operationalize the vision, we defined a roadmap of three distinct horizons:

Zalando Partner Parity: Match baseline capabilities of the existing Zalando Partner ecosystem to reduce migration friction and ensure continuity of experience.
Competitive Parity: Close capability gaps with market leaders. This required scaling operational processes and shifting from reactive support to more proactive enablement.
Differentiate: Leverage Zalando’s dominance in European fashion e-commerce to build contextual, industry-specific support features that generic fulfillment providers simply cannot replicate.

Zalando Partner Parity

Help Center / Knowledge base
Support ticket creation & management

Competitive Parity

Chat bot / AI capabilities
Video tutorials
Courses
Webinars

Differentiate

Seamless contextual support
Community forum (peer-to-peer)
White glove services

Establishing the Foundation

With the roadmap defined, the immediate next step became crystal clear: a centralised Help Center. Not a static content repository — but a structured, modular knowledge system designed to:

Be the single source of truth for all things ZEOS.
Reduce support tickets for common queries.
Standardize highl-level documentation quality.
Improve onboarding clarity.
Serve as the base layer for AI-driven and contextual support.

The ZEOS Help Center would lay the foundation and essentially enable all future support capabilities.

High-Level Structure

In architecting the Help Center, it was critical to take a systematic approach to ensure we could utilize the same structure and components for future, content heavy products on the roadmap, like the ZEOS Developer Portal.

In essence, the experience is composed of four distinct modules: a Landing Page for triage and discovery, a Browse Page for topic-based exploration, Search Results for intent-driven navigation, and standardized Article Pages that serve as the final destination for all flows.

Landing Page

Article Pages

Browse

Search Results

0.0%

Mobile Access 1

0.0%

Search First 2

Data-Informed Decisions

Insights from the recent redesign of the Zalando Partner University (the help center for single-channel, partner program merchants of Zalando) shaped my approach and design decisions. More specifically, two particular findings piqued my interest. First, the fact that close to a quarter of the visits happen from handheld devices. Secondly, finding out roughly 60% of users initiate their support journey via search. Implications:

Fully responsive experience considered from the get-go.
The inclusion of a table of contents inside articles, enabling quick navigation between sections.
Search elevated to hero prominence.

¹ Percentage of total amount of visitors who accessed the Zalando Partner website from a mobile phone in June, 2025.
² Percentage of total amount of visitors who start off by searching when they land on the Zalando Partner University page.

Landing Page Exploration

While most help centers follow a certain formula, I intentionally explored alternative structural configurations. I developed a modular low-fidelity prototype in Figma, enabling the entire Design & Research team to mix & match layout structures and evaluate trade-offs early. This facilitated alignment on information and module hierarchy before moving on to translating designs to a higher fidelity.

Mix & Match

Explore a number of the layout variations we prototyped for the help center landing page.

Header

Browse

FAQ

Extending the Design System

Our legacy component library was optimized for data-dense tooling interfaces, not text-heavy reading experiences. To build a robust foundation, I expanded our design system with scalable, CMS-ready documentation components.

Content Modules: Designed informational callouts, inline media containers, and modular table-of-contents for complex navigation.
Typographic Hierarchy: Overhauled line heights, weights, and font scales to maximize legibility for longer content articles.
Ecosystem Approach: These components were subsequently adopted by the ZEOS Developer Portal, transforming a single project into a systemic cross-product UI standard.

Info Callout

Good to know

The SLA for returns is 48 hours.

Sticky Nav

Introduction to Omnibus

Price Reduction Logic
Display Requirements

Global Market Exceptions

Compliance Timeline

Course

Getting started with ZEOS

Warning Callout

Warning

Window closes at 23:59.

Feedback

Found this article helpful?

Emphasis Block

Important

The CE label must be visible and recognizable.

Media Container

JPG, PNG, MP4

Article Card

Fulfilment 101

Get started with fulfilment by ZEOS.

Download Module

Labelling guide (PDF)

Packaging guide (PDF)

Validation &
Launch Trade-Offs

To ensure high velocity and a faster initial launch, we made calculated execution trade-offs while relying on moderated usability testing to validate our core assumptions.

Hard-coding the MVP: For the first release, we intentionally postponed the Contentful CMS integration and hard-coded the first set of articles to validate usage patterns before investing in heavy backend infrastructure.
Intentional Placeholders: Instead of hiding empty content categories, we kept placeholders visible on the landing page to establish the intended mental model and signal future capabilities to our users.
Refinements: Usability testing confirmed the overall structure, but highlighted the need for sharper navigational copy and a more sophisticated search experience, which became my primary focus before engineering handoff.

Usability testing with two participants in an office room.

Landing Page

The front door to self-service support. A unified entry point that highlights relevant topics, prioritizes the most common user queries and reduces support ticket volume by anticipating needs before they arise.
Browse Section

Intuitive discovery. We moved away from rigid hierarchies to a fluid, topic-based navigation that helps merchants explore complex logistics and fulfilment topics without feeling overwhelmed.
Search Results

Instant clarity. A redesigned search experience that doesn't just match exact keywords, but understands merchant intent, delivering the right articles at their fingertips.
Article Page

Actionable knowledge. Articles aren't just text; they are interactive guides designed to unblock users. Features like 'Related articles' and 'Did you find this article helpful?' make sure articles are never roadblocks.

Two people sitting in fron of a whiteboard full of notes

Impact & Reflections

Designing the ZEOS Help Center went far beyond pure user interface design – it required rewiring how the organization manages knowledge. By untangling fragmented ownership and misaligned incentives, we transformed a passive content repository into a strategic operational engine.

Organizational Process Shift: Exposed a critical gap in accountability during early taxonomy workshops, driving a cross-functional mandate to make user documentation a non-negotiable launch gate for all future ZEOS features.
Operational Deflection: Shifted the burden of common B2B merchant hurdles from expensive, high-touch support agents to a frictionless, self-serve architecture, directly protecting operational margins.
Ecosystem Scalability: Established the structural UI components and CMS foundation to accelerate ecosystem scalability, ensuring our support infrastructure can grow seamlessly alongside ZEOS’s rapid growth.

TL;DR

In close partnership with product, I defined the long-term vision and three-horizon roadmap for the ZEOS Support Ecosystem, transitioning the platform from high-touch manual support to a scalable self-service model.

Strategic Roadmap: Co-authored the vision for support capabilities, aligning technical feasibility with a long-term merchant-first user experience and gap analysis of the market.
Foundational Architecture: Led the end-to-end design of the ZEOS Help Center, covering everything from user journeys and information architecture to usability testing and engineering handover.
Systemic Thinking: Architected new support components, as an extension to our design system, now leveraged by the EOS Developer Portal, driving cross-user interface and experience consistency.
Future-Proofing: Established the foundation for upcoming AI-driven support and contextual in-portal help capabilities, directly reducing dependency on manual partner care agents which not only saves the merchant time but also reduces costs for Zalando.