Zip|Send

Zip|send, one of the many companies that fell victim to the dot com burst. Even though the company no longer exist, zip|send made its mark on the Internet. Zip|Send created a revolutionary method for users to send tangible gifts using only an online identity as the delivery address. More important this new technology finally allowed the recipient to be in control of the delivery destination and time.

Phases:
Zip|Send had its share of staff come and go. The day we had the third project manager give resonations notice, she came to me and dropped a stack of papers on my desk and said, "here this project is yours, you are the most qualified person to do this job". I was already overworked at the time, but I found this to be an exciting technology, and with no one left to do it, and a staff of programmers waiting for specs, I took the project on.

First I had to decipher three attempts at making this technology so that it was plug and play friendly, and more important I had to make sure that it would make sense to the end user.

Some of my challenges:

• Making it easy to create an account
• I had to create a system that could create trust with our new users, (the Internet was new and people were still very much afraid to give any personal information online)
• Make the system flexible to handel not only email identities but also make it flexible to handel Instant message ID's and community ID's (mainly dating)
• I had to make the system flexible to be able to handel multiple purchases.
  While doing this task I not only made it flexible to handel multiple purchases I also made something that I have yet to see anywhere else on the web. A shopping cart system that allowed the shopper to distribute their purchases to multiple recipients all in a single purchase. Imagine doing all your christmas shopping at Amazon, buying CD's, books, gadgets, cosmetics, etc. and then once you are finished shopping, upon checkout you designate what recipient gets what items. Using this innovative technology you would only need to know an online identity for the recipients mailing address.
• Create Billing pages
• Creating summary pages
• Creating Receipt pages
• Creating a users controlled account section
  • Purchase history
  • Manage multiple online Identities
  • Manage billing info
  • Change password
  • Create email gift reminders

Accomplishments:
The most exciting part of this entire project is not only did I accomplish something that three highly paid professionals were not able to do, I did it in record time. I also create mockups that were logically put together so well that the programmers were able to build the entire technology in three and a half weeks. Version 1.0 that had less than a third of the technology and it took a year and a half to build out.

Visit the site an archived version of some of my original layouts:
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Company: Zip|Send