Zainab Hussain is a seasoned e-commerce strategist who has spent years closing the gap between frontline realities and back‑office expertise. Her work centers on simplifying complex operations, elevating customer engagement, and building workflows that feel intuitive in motion. Fresh off a Gold win in the User Experience – Business category at the 2025 London Design Awards for 8×8 Engage, she opens up about designing a mobile‑first, unified workspace that brings voice, video, SMS, RCS, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Viber into one intelligent flow powered by context and AI. In our conversation, she unpacks how her team designed for faster responses and fewer dropped handoffs, how they connected contact center, unified communications, and APIs into one architecture, and what it takes to build accessibility, reliability, and adoption into the core of the product.
You just won Gold in the User Experience – Business category at the 2025 London Design Awards; what specific criteria or judge feedback stood out, and how did your team intentionally design for those points? Walk me through one pivotal decision, the tradeoffs you made, and its measurable impact.
The judges highlighted three things: a mobile‑first posture that truly reflects how teams work, a unified workspace that reduces cognitive load, and accessibility that doesn’t feel bolted on. We designed every interaction around the idea of “one intelligent workflow,” so users never lose context when they pivot across channels or collaborators. A pivotal decision was collapsing channel‑specific inboxes into a single thread per customer, with channel badges and quick‑switch actions. The tradeoff was giving up familiar, siloed views in favor of a learning curve, but the impact was immediate: faster responses and fewer dropped handoffs, with teams spending their energy on customers rather than hunting information.
You describe modern teams juggling disconnected apps; can you map a typical “before and after” day for a frontline rep and a back‑office expert? Share concrete time saved, handoffs reduced, and an anecdote showing how context changed an outcome.
Before, a rep started the day bouncing between apps, copying IDs into chats, and DM’ing an expert who lacked the full story. The expert had to ask for screenshots, then toggle tools to locate the right account. After, Engage provides a unified timeline—voice notes, messages, and video calls in one place—so the rep brings the expert into the same thread with embedded context. One moment stands out: a billing specialist joined a WhatsApp conversation mid‑stream and, with history and sentiment cues in view, resolved a misunderstanding on the spot instead of initiating another handoff.
8×8 Engage unifies voice, video, SMS, RCS, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Viber; how did you prioritize which channels to integrate first, and what were the hardest technical or UX hurdles? Explain your step‑by‑step workflow design and the metrics you used to validate it.
We prioritized by ubiquity and continuity—start with channels that dominate customer touchpoints and are often used in the same journey. The hardest hurdles were harmonizing message states across heterogeneous protocols and keeping the UI consistent while honoring each channel’s norms. Our workflow starts with a single conversation object, then channel‑aware actions, and finally escalation paths to voice or video without leaving the thread. Validation focused on response speed and consistency of experience across channels, ensuring one place to work delivers the same clarity every time.
You call Engage “mobile‑first”; what design patterns proved essential on small screens, and where did you adapt desktop conventions? Describe a real field scenario, the specific interactions involved, and before/after response times or error rates.
Thumb‑reachable controls, progressive disclosure, and persistent context chips were essential on small screens. We adapted desktop conventions like multi‑pane layouts into collapsible layers—details are a swipe away, not a new app. In the field, a supervisor moved between locations while juggling Messenger and voice; quick‑reply templates and one‑tap escalate to video kept the flow steady. The result was snappier replies and fewer input errors because the user never left the conversation view to hunt for tools.
The product is “powered by context and AI”; which context signals matter most, how are they surfaced in the UI, and what guardrails do you apply? Share a detailed example that shows how AI reduces cognitive load and improves resolution time.
The most valuable signals are conversation history, prior resolutions, channel preference, and who last touched the case. We surface them as inline cards and subtle prompts that suggest next steps without overwhelming the screen. Guardrails include keeping humans in control with editable suggestions and clear visibility into what data informs recommendations. In one case, AI summarized a long multi‑channel thread and proposed a resolution based on similar past interactions; the expert accepted the outline, added a personal note, and closed the loop without back‑and‑forth.
You mention fewer dropped handoffs; how do you detect and prevent them in practice? Outline the journey from trigger to resolution, the cross‑team collaboration steps, and the KPIs you track to prove reliability gains.
We detect risk through stalled states and context gaps—when ownership changes without a visible plan, a flag appears in the conversation. Prevention comes from shared threads and explicit roles so experts join with full context rather than starting from scratch. The journey is simple: trigger, notify, invite the right specialist, and complete within the same conversation. We track continuity—how often a customer stays in one thread from start to finish—and the rate of successful completions without re‑contact.
Engage serves billing, IT, HR, and finance as well as frontline teams; how did you tailor workflows for such different roles without bloating the interface? Walk through one role’s end‑to‑end task, the shortcuts provided, and the adoption data you’ve seen.
We leaned on role‑aware views and action menus that reveal only what matters. For billing, an end‑to‑end task begins with a message, opens a contextual card with account history, and offers quick actions like verify, adjust, or escalate—all inside the same thread. Shortcuts surface the most used actions at the moment they’re needed, so the screen stays calm. Adoption rose because teams recognized their own language and tasks reflected in the interface, not a maze of generic features.
As part of the 8×8 Platform for CX, how does Engage connect contact center, unified communications, and APIs in one architecture? Share a customer rollout story, the integration sequence, and the performance or cost metrics that convinced stakeholders.
Engage sits where conversations live, with contact center routing feeding threads, unified communications enabling real‑time voice and video, and APIs enriching context cards. A typical rollout started by connecting core channels, then enabling voice and video, and finally layering custom data via APIs to personalize service. Stakeholders saw faster responses and more consistent experiences without adding operational overhead, which made the case. The architecture gave them one place to manage change and scale.
What onboarding playbook works best to “standardize on one architecture” without adding operational overhead? Detail the phases, change‑management steps, enablement content, and one pitfall you learned to avoid.
Our playbook moves from discovery to pilot to scale, keeping teams in real workflows from day one. Change management hinges on champions, role‑specific guides, and short scenario‑based training embedded in the product. We ship checklists and in‑app cues so users learn while doing rather than sitting through long sessions. The pitfall to avoid is flipping every switch at once; start with the channels and roles that will see immediate value, then expand.
Accessibility and usability are central to the award; which concrete accessibility features shipped first, and how did you test them in real environments? Give examples of assistive workflows, the standards you aligned to, and outcomes from user studies.
We shipped high‑contrast themes, scalable text, screen‑reader‑friendly labels, and keyboard and gesture parity early on. Testing included live ride‑alongs and sessions with assistive technologies in noisy, on‑the‑move environments. An assistive workflow example is composing quick replies with clear focus states and voice input, then sending without leaving the thread. Users reported less strain and greater confidence, which is the best usability metric there is.
Can you unpack your design research process for Engage—methods used, sample sizes, and how insights changed the roadmap? Share one surprising finding, how it reshaped a key flow, and the metrics that moved after launch.
We blended contextual inquiry, diary studies, and iterative prototype testing to capture how work actually happens. One surprise was how often experts join mid‑conversation and need to “feel the room” before acting. That insight led to richer thread summaries and inline cues, so people can jump in with confidence. After launch, we saw smoother collaboration and quicker resolutions because context traveled with the work.
Looking ahead, what’s next for Engage across channels, AI, or analytics? Lay out the sequence you plan to tackle, the dependencies you’re managing, and the business outcomes you expect, with any early proof points from pilots.
We’ll deepen channel parity, expand contextual signals, and bring more explainable AI into the flow, all while strengthening analytics that reflect real‑world journeys. Dependencies include partner integrations and maintaining a single conversation model so features land consistently. The outcome we expect is the same promise that won us Gold: faster responses, fewer dropped handoffs, and a calmer workspace. Early pilots show teams standardize on one architecture more easily when the product meets them where they are.
Do you have any advice for our readers?
Build for the way people actually move through their day, not the way org charts look. Start with one place to work, let context travel with the task, and treat accessibility as a product strength, not a requirement to check off. Keep humans in control of AI and make every escalation a continuation, not a restart. If you do that, you won’t just reduce effort—you’ll earn trust at every touchpoint.
