DesignLive: Originating a Real-Time Co-Design Service From the Ground Up
Most new products start with a brief. This one started with a question: what if a small business owner could sit down with a professional designer, in real time, and walk away with exactly what they had in their head?
There was no roadmap, no precedent at Vistaprint, and no guarantee it would get off the ground. What there was, was a clear gap in the market – nearly every competitor offering design services was doing it asynchronously, with all the back-and-forth, delay, and miscommunication that comes with that model. The opportunity to put customers and designers face-to-face, live, felt both obvious and completely untested. I made the case for it, managed proof of concept build, and led the service from first concept through launch.
Product and Design Strategy • Service Design · UX • Creative Direction
Starting With the Customer, Not the Solution
Before anything was designed or pitched, I needed to know whether customers actually wanted this. I partnered with the analytics team to identify customers who had recently used Vistaprint's design services, selecting for recency so their experiences were still fresh. Together with the business owner, we reached out directly by phone to talk through the concept, probe their frustrations with the existing service model, and gauge their openness to something new.
What we heard confirmed the instinct. Customers struggled to communicate design ideas remotely. Turnaround times frustrated them. Errors, from both sides, were common and costly. The idea of a live, collaborative session with a real designer resonated immediately.
We paired those conversations with a competitive analysis, looking at direct competitors and adjacent industries offering similar services. Very few came close to what we were proposing. That gap was both validation and opportunity.
Building the Case for Leadership
Customer enthusiasm is one thing. Executive buy-in is another. With the research in hand, I developed the materials needed to make the case internally: proposed user flows, a rudimentary prototype, and a pitch video that brought the concept to life for leadership, designers, and developers who hadn't yet seen it.
The flows mapped three distinct entry points into the DesignLive experience: from the dedicated service page, from the return visitor homepage, and from within the Design Studio itself. Each path had to feel natural within the existing Vistaprint ecosystem while introducing something genuinely new. The prototype walkthrough with real customer reactions gave leadership a concrete sense of how the service would land and made the approval conversation significantly easier.
Proof of concept presentation for executive leadership
Prototype walkthrough showing test customer reactions
What DesignLive Delivered
A net-new co-design service that put Vistaprint customers face-to-face with professional designers in real time cutting turnaround times, reducing design errors, and creating a level of personalization that no asynchronous competitor could match. Service satisfaction rates improved. Brand perception improved. And Vistaprint had a genuinely differentiated offering in a category where differentiation is hard to come by.
Users had multiple ways to enter into the DesignLive experience depending on how they were actively engaging with Vistaprint's product ecosystem. Below are a few examples of these entry points and user flows.
Beginning from the DesignLive service page:
Beginning from the Vistaprint return visitor homepage:
Beginning from any product's design studio environment:
Arming a Global Design Team to Deliver
Launching DesignLive wasn't just a product design challenge. It was an operational one. Our service designers were based internationally but serving primarily North American customers, which meant there was a real risk of cultural and stylistic misalignment in the live sessions.
To close that gap, I partnered with Megan Morahan, Creative Director of the Product Template Design Team, to develop a comprehensive industry design guide – a set of reference materials outlining design principles, current trends, and industry-specific inspiration that designers could access in real time while working with customers. These weren't passive documents. They were tools built for speed, giving designers the context and confidence to produce work that felt locally relevant and on-brand regardless of where they were working from.
The guides were developed across multiple industries by a team of designers including Alex Rocklein, Elly Brady, Mary Ellen Campisi, Kevin McHugh, and Jenn Nguyen.
