Zix — Unifying Apps Across a Merger

Customers admin: filter dropdowns and a 10,000-row account table with status badges.

Allowed-list requests: three cards to approve or deny senders, domains, and IPs.

Test LDAP query page showing two imported users and expandable raw directory data.

Default permissions screen with a success toast, undo action, and 125-user table.

Domain protection table flagged for errors and an allowed/blocked-list conflict.

Mail logs filtered by type, with rows labeled Naughty, Nice, and Spam.

Office 365 security audit dashboard with audit counts and partner workflow shortcuts.

Quarantine released-mail screen with search filters and bulk release or delete actions.

The business problem

Zix was operating separate softwares, neither of them sharing a design language, interaction patterns, or information architecture.

For enterprise buyers, this is a problem. A CISO or IT director sees integration risks, training overhead, and evidence of organizational fragmentation. A unified product signals maturity and reduces perceived vendor risk. A fragmented one raises it.

Product showcase

The brief: audit the product surface, establish a governed design system, and unify the experience across apps—without halting product development or triggering a full rebuild.

Research

Long list of admin user stories: add or remove users, domains, and services.

Audit

Whiteboard titled Anatomy of a Data Table, covered in wireframes and printed screenshots.

Patterns

Expanded table-row pattern doc with usage rules, accessibility notes, and a status-change example.

System

Nine admin screens: domain protection, message search, user permissions, and security audits.

What I owned

I was the sole hands-on designer.

The UX Director provided strategic oversight; execution was mine. I owned the audit and research methodology, the design system end-to-end, and all interaction design across the engagement. The ratio of UX to engineering at Zix was approximately 70:1. That constraint shaped every decision I made about how to work.

Collage of pre-merger admin UIs from AppRiver, VIPRE, ConnectWise, and ZixPort. — Four products, four admin experiences — before anything could be unified.

Understanding the problem

I conducted a Top Tasks analysis across the product suite.

My work identified the most critical functions users performed, mapped them to existing workflows, and validated which tasks recurred across multiple apps. The finding that mattered most: the same tasks were being accomplished in structurally different ways depending on which app a user was in.

I also ran an extensive audit of design patterns across all 21 applications. The dominant interaction pattern, by a wide margin, was the table. But every team had implemented tables differently — different column structures, sort behaviors, action patterns, and visual treatment. The audit made the scope undeniable.

Admin user-story list beside Slack threads about display-name spoofing and customer parity. — Top Tasks became hundreds of admin stories; the hard calls happened in Slack.

The three decisions that mattered

Scale influence, not control.

At a 70:1 designer-to-engineer ratio, the instinct to own every UX decision is a trap. I educated and empowered engineering teams to build correctly — documentation, making the right choice the easy choice, and trusted advisor relationships. The design system was a transfer of design judgment at scale.

Don't redesign everything at once.

I structured incremental unification: audit patterns, govern high-frequency interactions first (tables, forms, dashboards), then roll out across apps in priority order — always something concrete to ship.

Work with the table pattern, not against it.

I standardized and elevated the table pattern instead of replacing it. Consistent sort/filter, readable spacing, accessible targets — the existing paradigm done correctly and consistently everywhere.

Nine admin screens: compliance policies, role profiles, message search, and user permissions. — 21 apps meant 21 ways to do the same admin task.

Design system

The design system in practice.

The system was built on Abstract + Sketch, with a single source of truth linked directly to engineering handoffs. Developers accessed the latest version at all times — no stale exports, no "which file is current" conversations.

Prototypes were built against requirements, tested, and refined until releasable. Edge cases and failure states were system components — success messages, undo actions, and clear error states — not afterthoughts.

Accessibility was addressed systematically: larger interaction targets, increased spacing, and simplified flows were properties of the system.

Browse the pattern gallery

Message search and bulk export at mobile, tablet, and desktop breakpoints. — Same search-and-export flow, reflowed for three breakpoints.

Nine admin panels: spoofing rules, message export, customer list, and forwarding-risk audit. — High-traffic admin flows after the shared table and form patterns landed.

LDAP query test results shown at mobile, tablet, and desktop widths. — Directory-import testing had to stay readable on a phone.

Partner customer list with filters and guest-admin banner at three screen sizes. — Partner admins manage thousands of accounts — filters and bulk actions had to scale.

Quarantine released-mail screen with date and subject search plus bulk release or delete. — Quarantine — search 10,000 released messages, act on a page at a time.

Allowed-list request cards with toggles to approve or deny each sender, domain, or IP. — Allowed-list requests — approve the domain, deny the IP, save the rest for later.

Domain protection settings table with error banners and a conflict to resolve. — Domain protection — errors surfaced inline instead of after a failed save.

Mail log search with rows tagged Naughty, Nice, or Spam and a view action per row. — Mail logs — filter by type, scan 42 results, open one to inspect.

Default permissions screen after a save, with a success toast, undo, and 125-user list. — Default permissions — change once, confirm with toast and undo.

Office 365 security audit partner dashboard with start steps, metrics, and report shortcuts. — Partners run O365 audits from one dashboard — schedule, track, and hand off reports.

Results

“At first [this software] was annoying to use, but in recent years they've made it much easier to deal with.”

Customer review Zix product user

In November 2021, OpenText acquired Zix for $860 million. In the year following the design system launch, Zix's ARR increased 21% per SEC filings, with approximately 40,000 net new users.

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