Product Design 0→1
Research
2021 ∙ Zellar
United Kingdom

In 2021 the UK government was pushing businesses hard towards Net Zero, but most companies had no idea where to start. Only 38% had taken any steps at all. The tools that existed were fragmented, mostly offline, and required manual calculations. There was nothing that could track emissions, suggest improvements, and help offset them all in one place.

Zellar was built to fill that gap. It was a completely new product category, a SaaS platform for small and medium businesses to measure their carbon footprint, track sustainability actions, and benchmark against others in their industry.

I joined as the sole product designer before anything was built. About ten business interviews had been done before I came on board, and I took it from there, owning the full design process from concept through to launch and beyond.

Understanding the problem

When I went through the initial research, one thing stood out. Businesses didn’t just find sustainability tracking complicated. They found it boring. It felt like admin, something to tick off rather than actually engage with. And that was the real problem, because if people aren’t motivated, no amount of good UX will keep them coming back.

 That’s when I realised we could approach this differently. Businesses are naturally competitive. If a company could see how it compared to others in its industry, that could be genuinely motivating. The product didn’t have to be just a dashboard. It could have a social layer, with benchmarking, public profiles, and gamified actions that made progress feel visible and worth sharing.

Design

The first thing to solve was onboarding. Carbon tracking involves a lot of complexity: electricity meters, vehicle fuel types, supply chain data. Most users had no background in any of it. I designed step-by-step wizards that guided businesses through each category, asking plain-language questions and using the answers to pull in data automatically where possible. It made the initial setup feel manageable rather than overwhelming.

Branding illustrations by Felipe Caro

The V1 dashboard launched in September 2021 with quite a lot already built in — a social feed where businesses could share their sustainability stories, a detailed emissions breakdown across energy, travel, and supply chain, and sector benchmarking so companies could see how they compared. It was a solid start. But after watching how users moved through the product it became clear the experience still felt like a series of tasks to get through rather than something people wanted to come back to.

V2 was a significant redesign. I replaced the linear flow with action cards. Each card represented a sustainability action a business could complete in any order, earning points along the way. It turned the experience into something closer to a game than a checklist. The dashboard also gained a social feed showing achievements from other businesses, benchmarking against similar companies, and green technology recommendations

The emissions tracking section broke down carbon footprint into clear categories: buildings, vehicles, business travel, employees, and supply chain. Each one showed trends over time with specific actions tied to it.

Knowing your emissions is only half the picture. I also designed a green technology marketplace where businesses could browse energy-saving solutions relevant to their sector, and a carbon offset section where they could purchase verified offset projects — with full transparency on pricing, duration, and impact. It gave businesses a clear path from measuring to actually doing something about it.

Each business got a public profile where they could show off their sustainability progress with badges and emissions data. It gave people a real reason to keep their data up to date. They wanted to look good publicly. A community map showed other businesses in their area doing the same, which added another layer of competitive motivation.

Results

Designed and launched the platform from scratch, moving from zero to a revenue-generating product with a growing paying customer base

£600K seed funding & £33M valuation

Secured investment from The Co-operative Bank, with the platform reaching a £33M valuation following launch

Adopted by local UK governments

Zellar was integrated into local government sustainability initiatives, supporting businesses in achieving net zero and contributing to national targets

Indigo Design Award

Indigo Design Awards silver winner in Digital Tools & Utilities and Interactive Design. 

Reflection

Working as the sole designer on a completely new product category taught me to be pragmatic about process. I introduced a lightweight UI kit instead of a full design system early on and it kept things moving without sacrificing visual consistency.

Most design decisions were validated through post-launch data — heatmaps, session recordings, analytics, and A/B tests — rather than formal usability testing upfront. It worked well and the product iterated quickly because of it. Looking back though, having usability testing earlier in the process would have caught some friction points before they reached users rather than after.

London, UK