ZERO was becoming harder to evolve.
Engineering was losing too much time building screens from scratch. Similar patterns kept being redesigned and rebuilt: list items, actions, information lists, success screens. Every new flow created more custom work, more QA, more maintenance, and more room for inconsistency.
At the same time, ZERO had not evolved at the same pace as the NGRAVE brand, the website, or LIQUID. It was still the main product, but it no longer felt like the most polished part of the ecosystem.
The redesign started from a practical need: simplify the UI, define reusable components, and create one source of truth across design, copy, development, and QA. The sprint turned that engineering bottleneck into a user-validated redesign direction.
The Brief Was Bigger Than a Visual Refresh.
The kickoff goals were practical. ZERO needed to become easier to use, easier to scale, and easier to build.
That meant solving three things at once:
- A clearer UX: better readability, repeated interaction patterns, stronger guidance, and better use of the larger ZERO screen
- A stronger system: reusable components, shared colors, spacing, buttons, list items, and content rules
- A better build process: less development guesswork, better design-to-copy-to-QA alignment, and performance constraints considered from the start
The redesign was not only about making ZERO look more modern. It was about creating a system that could make the product clearer for users and faster for Engineering to maintain.
The Research Problem: Air-Gapped Products Don't Give You Analytics.
ZERO is fully offline by design. It does not connect to the internet, does not phone home, and does not collect behaviour data.
That protects users, but it also creates a research problem. There were no funnels, drop-off points, heatmaps, or quantitative usage data to tell us where users struggled.
So the sprint had to create its own evidence. I combined Customer Support input, Zendesk data, user interviews, opportunity mapping, and prototype testing to uncover the patterns we could not measure through product analytics.
The First Signal Came From Support. The Next Came From Customers.
Before speaking to customers, I wanted to understand where friction already existed. I started with support data and conversations with the Customer Support team to identify recurring patterns, then used customer interviews to validate and deepen those insights.
- Zendesk Data — Analysed support tickets to identify recurring issues, friction points, and behavioural patterns across the customer journey.
- Customer Support Team — Interviewed support agents to understand the most common questions, pain points, and areas where users frequently required assistance.
- Customer Interviews — Validated and expanded on support insights through direct conversations with customers, uncovering the underlying causes behind recurring usability issues.
The Product Worked. The Experience Could Work Harder.
Users did not think ZERO was broken. Navigation, signing, syncing, and the overall structure were seen as logical and easy to understand.
That changed the redesign brief. This was not about reinventing ZERO. It was about making the product clearer, more scalable, and more premium while protecting what already worked.
Five Opportunity Areas Kept Coming Back.
Across the research, five opportunity areas kept coming back:
- Small Interactions Created Friction Throughout the Experience: Many tap targets were smaller than users expected, making interactions feel less reliable and increasing the likelihood of missed taps. Combined with small text sizes and dense layouts, this added unnecessary friction to routine tasks across the product.
- The Most Critical Step Had the Least Support: Generating private keys and creating a backup is the most important moment in the ownership journey. It's also the moment where users feel the highest level of anxiety. Despite its importance, guidance and reassurance were limited.
- Complex Information Competing for Attention: Several screens attempted to communicate too much at once. Important actions and information often competed for attention, creating unnecessary cognitive load despite the available screen space.
- Users Needed More Guidance at the Moment of Need: Error states, warnings, and instructional content frequently lacked sufficient context. Users understood that something had happened but were often left uncertain about why it happened or what to do next.
- Settings Were Difficult to Navigate: The settings experience had grown organically over time. Categories lacked a clear organising principle, making it difficult for users to predict where settings lived or quickly find what they were looking for.
The biggest issue was not one broken flow. It was the system underneath the flows.
ZERO needed clearer components, stronger interaction patterns, better content rules, and a layout system that could scale with future features.
I Turned the Top 3 Opportunities Into Prototypes to Validate.
Based on the research, I focused the prototypes on the three flows that could prove the new direction fastest: onboarding, signing transactions, and settings.
These flows carried most of the discovered problems: readability, scalability, guidance, hierarchy, actions, copy, and reusable components.
I tested the top flows with 3 customers and integrated their feedback into the next iteration. Their feedback helped refine the settings hierarchy, transaction guidance, and which improvements were ready for short-term releases versus the deeper redesign track.
In the weeks after the sprint, I continued with targeted assumption testing around the additional opportunity areas we had discovered.
The work did not end as a broad redesign concept. It became a set of validated improvements we could prioritise with Product and Engineering.
The Sprint Turned the Redesign Into Roadmap Priorities.
We went ahead with the redesign, but treated it as a longer strategic goal instead of one big release.
Together with Engineering and Product, we prioritised the validated assumptions on the roadmap.
Small effort, high-impact improvements like contrast, button sizes, font sizes, clearer tap areas, and copy improvements were moved into upcoming releases.
Bigger structural improvements, like clearer hierarchy, a stronger transaction flow, better guidance, and a reusable component system, became part of the redesign track.
The sprint did not only define where ZERO needed to go. It helped us decide what to improve first, what to plan next, and how to turn validated research into roadmap decisions.
