UX/UI Designer – Lead Designer
2023-2025
New Platform
Nicklas provides innovative solutions for corporate swag, holiday gifts selection platform, and event gifting. To stay ahead in a highly competitive market dominated by well-established companies, Nicklas set out to develop a next-generation gift selection platform—one that would disrupt the industry with a fresh, innovative approach.
The goal was to go beyond traditional offerings and introduce a visually engaging, user-friendly platform with unique features that competitors lacked.
The platform is sold to companies, while the end users are employees selecting gifts through the platform.
Initially envisioned as a gifts selection website, the platform quickly evolved into a comprehensive and complex system catering to multiple user types:
Beyond its core purpose of facilitating holiday gifting, Nicklas expanded the system’s capabilities to support year-round corporate gifting—for birthdays, milestones, and ongoing employee rewards. The platform also evolved technologically, incorporating internal features like direct price quotes for corporate clients, streamlining procurement processes.
This transformation positioned the system not just as a gift selection platform but as a comprehensive corporate gifting solution, delivering both strategic business value and an enhanced user experience.
To understand the market landscape, we conducted an in-depth analysis of our key competitors. The market is dominated by well-established companies that have been operating for years. One of the main challenges—but also a significant opportunity—for Nicklas was the rigid and outdated systems of these competitors.
While these companies have a loyal customer base and maintain long-standing relationships with large organizations, their platforms have remained unchanged for years. Due to their stability, they had little incentive to introduce innovations, leaving a gap for a fresh and modern alternative.
Nicklas seized this opportunity to introduce a cutting-edge, user-friendly platform designed to disrupt the market by offering features that competitors lack. This strategic positioning allowed us to target organizations looking for a more advanced and engaging solution for their corporate gifting needs.
Our target audience is divided into two different user types:
To ensure a seamless user experience, we focused on two distinct user personas with very different digital behaviors:
👩💻 Tech-Savvy Employee (Age 35, High-Tech Industry)
👷 Non-Tech Employee (Age 48-63, Low-Tech Industry)
Given the broad range of users, our goal was to design a highly intuitive and inclusive platform that caters to both digital natives and users with minimal technological experience.
Beyond the user-facing experience, we also conducted research to enhance the internal operational side of the platform. We interviewed sales representatives and customer success managers, gathering insights into their daily workflow, pain points, and efficiency challenges.
Key objectives:
1. Identify inefficiencies in current workflows.
2. Streamline internal processes to save time and resources.
3. Enhance usability for internal employees managing client accounts.
By addressing these challenges, we aimed to reduce workload, improve productivity, and enhance overall employee satisfaction, ultimately making the platform more scalable and efficient.
After mapping out the full platform flow, we decided to focus our initial release (MVP) exclusively on the end-user experience.
The goal was to develop a simple and intuitive version that would allow employees to seamlessly select their gifts, ensuring a smooth user experience. This approach enabled the company to launch quickly without delays, allowing organizations to start using the platform while additional features were being developed.
By prioritizing the core functionality for employees first, we ensured that the gifting process was efficient, user-friendly, and ready for immediate adoption.
After the initial MVP release, we expanded the employee gifting experience with additional features to enhance flexibility and improve user engagement.
1. Multi-Item Selection
We designed an intuitive multi-item selection flow, allowing employees to build a personalized gift bundle instead of choosing just one item. Optimized browsing, filtering, and selection UX led to an increase to 2.4 gifts per user, a 7% drop in voucher selection, and a 25% revenue boost per user.
2. “Money Product” (Gift Voucher Integration)
The customizable gift voucher introduced complex interactions, requiring 17 wireframed UX edge cases to define pricing logic, discount handling, and user flows. Smart validations and clear UI design ensured a seamless experience, balancing user flexibility and platform efficiency.
One of the biggest UX challenges was merging two purchasing models—physical gifts and digital vouchers—into a single, seamless experience. Since this was a new concept in the market, we had to educate users on how to manage their budget dynamically.
Solutions Implemented:
✔ Persistent Shopping Cart – The cart follows the user throughout their selection process, allowing them to add/remove items while seeing real-time budget updates.
✔ Visible Budget Tracker – Employees always see their remaining budget at a glance.
✔ Clear Budget Breakdown – A dedicated row displays the total cost of selected gifts separately from the remaining budget.
✔ Voucher Discounts Display – Ensuring users see applicable discounts directly in their cart.
✔ Quick Add/Remove Functionality – Users can adjust quantities and remove items directly from the floating cart interface for a smooth experience.
This phase marked a significant shift in how employees interact with corporate gifting, as we introduced a new purchasing behavior that was not standard in the market—essentially shaping a new industry norm.
After successfully launching the employee-facing gift selection platform, we shifted our focus to optimizing the internal company system to improve operational efficiency.
The internal system was built around functional workflows without structured UX/UI design in the early development phase. The focus was on rapid deployment, ensuring the company could operate even as the MVP was still evolving.
For my case study, I focused on the campaign creation process, a long and complex UX flow that directly impacts operational efficiency and workforce demands. Refining the interaction design, streamlining steps, and optimizing the user journey reduced campaign setup time by 75%, significantly improving productivity and scalability.
As part of the campaign setup process, we tackled three critical UX challenges to enhance usability and efficiency:
1. Step 3: Product Selection – Ensuring seamless selection, quick pricing adjustments, and category customizations.
2. Step 4: Design Customization – Improving the experience of customizing the campaign’s visual elements.
3. Step 5: Link & Notifications (Email & SMS) – Streamlining communication settings for employees receiving the campaign link.
Each stage had its own UX challenges and solutions, as detailed below.
* Efficient product selection – Users needed a fast and intuitive way to browse and select from a large product catalog.
* Bulk price adjustments – Each company has a different budget per employee, which affects product pricing. Previously, prices had to be adjusted one by one, slowing down the workflow.
* Clear overview of selected products – No easy way to see, manage, or remove selected products.
* Custom product categories per company – Some companies required products to be categorized differently from the default system.
✔ List-Based Selection & Smart Filtering
✔ Bulk Price Editing Panel & Competitive Insights
✔ Sidebar for Selected Products & AI-Based Optimization
* Difficult hero image upload – No streamlined method for managing visual assets.
* No live preview – Users had to work blindly and check results only after finalizing the campaign.
* Multilingual text input issues – No intuitive way to switch between Hebrew and English text fields.
* Lack of clear design flow – No structured way to navigate between design elements (hero image, text, and colors).
* No dynamic text color adjustments – Users couldn’t modify text colors based on the background image for better readability.
✔ Image Gallery & Upload Options
✔ Live Preview Panel
✔ Multilingual Tabs
✔ Step-Based Navigation
✔ Dynamic Text Color Adjustment
* No character limit for SMS messages – Risk of exceeding message length and sending multiple unintended texts.
* No email preview – Users couldn’t see how emails appeared before sending them.
* No scheduling & reminder flexibility – Users couldn’t send custom reminders at different times and with varying messages.
✔ Character Counter for SMS
✔ Email Preview Button
✔ Reminder Scheduling Panel
🚀 More efficient campaign creation – Reduced the time required for product selection, design setup, and notifications.
🎨 Enhanced design flexibility – Provided intuitive customization tools for branding & multilingual support.
📩 Smarter notifications – Allowed for customized, scheduled communication with employees.
By implementing these UX improvements, we streamlined the entire campaign setup process, making it faster, more intuitive, and scalable for future expansions.
Designing the Nicklas platform was an exciting challenge that required a deep understanding of user behavior, business needs, and operational efficiency. From initial research and user flows to AI-powered optimizations and seamless UX solutions, every step was aimed at creating a smarter, more intuitive experience for both corporate clients and employees.
Through this process, we tackled complex workflows, automated decision-making, and streamlined product selection, customization, and notifications—all while ensuring the platform remains scalable and future-ready.
This project reinforced my passion for designing functional, user-friendly systems that solve real business challenges. By combining research-driven insights, strategic UX, and innovative solutions, we successfully transformed a traditional corporate gifting process into a modern, efficient, and engaging platform.
I’m excited to continue refining and improving digital experiences that drive impact, efficiency, and growth. 🚀