Gift Card Capabilities Refactoring
Restructuring a mature product around new EU compliance requirements.
ZalandoCompliance without disrupting a familiar customer experience.
I restructured Zalando’s gift-card capabilities to meet EU compliance requirements while preserving the purchase, balance and redemption journeys customers already understood.
- Role
- Senior Product Designer
- Market
- European Union
- Scope
- Gift-card capabilities
- Constraint
- Regulatory compliance
Goals
Translate regulation into a clear product model.
The challenge was to satisfy new compliance rules without exposing customers to the organisational and technical complexity behind them.
Preserve familiarity
Keep established customer actions recognisable wherever the rules allowed.
Clarify constraints
Make balances, limits and eligibility understandable at the moment they matter.
Design for change
Create a capability structure that could absorb future regulatory requirements.
Approach
Refactoring the capability, not just the interface.
I mapped the existing gift-card lifecycle, identified where compliance rules changed system behaviour, and reorganised the experience around explicit states and reusable capabilities. The customer-facing interface then expressed those rules in plain, predictable steps.
Results
A compliance-ready structure with continuity for customers.
The resulting direction aligned the product with EU requirements while protecting the core gift-card experience from unnecessary disruption.