Zive, Inc.: Leveraging Design To Deliver New Innovations To G Suite

Gmail has become an extremely popular email service with more than 1.5 billion users worldwide. Businesses have also been rapidly adopting Gmail and, more recently, G Suite—which includes apps such as Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Calendar, and Meet. More than 5 million paying businesses now use these applications to work more collaboratively and increase productivity.

The Challenge of Transitioning to G Suite

The main drawback of G Suite is that people must use a traditional web browser to access its applications. However, browsers were never meant to serve as UIs for complex cloud-based applications. The resulting user experience can be frustrating because it requires users to change the way they work. As a result, companies often encounter significant challenges when transitioning to G Suite and find that the most difficult part of rolling out the new platform is achieving widespread adoption. Instead of embracing the new apps, employees often prefer to continue using more intuitive and familiar alternatives. This means many businesses find themselves paying for both G Suite and traditional desktop applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Dropbox and Outlook. This can significantly raise the overall cost of deploying G Suite.

An Innovative Solution

Both Kiwi for Gmail and the enterprise version, Kiwi for G Suite, are desktop applications developed by Zive, Inc, that help overcome the limitations and frustrations of using G Suite in the web browser. Kiwi transforms G Suite into a multi-windowed environment that looks and feels much more like Microsoft’s traditional Office suite. They separate G Suite apps from the browser so they can exist on their own, as independent applications that are completely integrated with your desktop OS and file systems. Kiwi not only makes it easier to multi-task but also simplifies using multiple email accounts while providing a more intuitive way to use Google Drive.

This innovative approach more closely aligns the G Suite user experience with the way employees actually work, solving one of the biggest challenges for enterprises transitioning to G Suite. In the process, Kiwi helps companies achieve more successful G Suite rollouts while decreasing IT effort, reducing dependency on other apps and improving their overall ROI.

Using Design to Innovate

Zive Founder and CEO Eric Shashoua is a serial entrepreneur who recognizes the power of design to make products more useful. He previously led Zeo, Inc, where he raised $14M in VC funding and launched the Zeo Personal Sleep Coach application in the US and Europe. Eric’s management philosophy was strongly influenced by the CEOs of Bose and iRobot who were members of Zeo’s board. Their focus on product design and performance inspired Eric and instilled a design-driven approach that guides Zive’s mission of creating humanized products that are both beautiful and simple to use.

Eric understands that design can be used as a key differentiator to make technology products indispensable. Along with his team, he constantly strives to anticipate users’ needs before they’re even able to articulate them and develop products that are both elegant and intuitive. Zive pays attention to each and every detail of its applications and believes that it’s these small things that ultimately drive user engagement.

When developing Kiwi, Eric’s goal was to create a product that would make a real difference in people’s lives. He quickly identified Gmail and G Suite as applications where design could dramatically improve usability for millions of users. It took more than two years to build Kiwi from the ground up and deliver a desktop app which is faster, easier to use, and more reliable than G Suite in the browser

Benefits of Using G Suite with Kiwi

Google’s Gmail and G Suite apps contain many useful features. However, this functionality is often difficult for users to find and use. Kiwi’s design makes these features more powerful by making them more intuitive, while adding additional functionality that simply isn’t possible through the browser.

For example, Google’s AI for “important flags” is a powerful feature that Zive believed could be improved by applying it in a more useful way. One of the fundamental problems people have always had with email is the noise that floods their inboxes and makes it difficult to find what they need when they need it. Kiwi’s newest innovation, the Focus Filtered Inbox, delivers a powerful, dynamic inbox that can filter out email noise with a set of persistent filters you can mix, match, and flip on and off with a single click.

In addition to the expected G Suite functionality, Kiwi also enables users to quickly access each G Suite application, open new documents, and get back to recent documents with a single click using Kiwi’s intuitive, multiple windows interface.

A recent analysis of Kiwi for G Suite users revealed a significant increase in their usage of key G Suite apps and a measurable improvement in computer performance.

• 140% increase in user adoption of Google Drive
• 74% increase in usage of G Suite applications such as Sheets, Docs and Slides
• Up to 30% less memory usage versus using in Chrome

Meeting Client Demands while Eliminating Challenges

Zive has clients across numerous industries and all around the world. Kiwi for Gmail users have embraced the attention to detail and thoughtful design that Eric and his team have applied to Gmail and G Suite. Zive plans to build on Kiwi’s success by continuing to use the power of design to develop even more features that enhance the functionality of Gmail and other individual G Suite applications. Eric and his team constantly strive to demonstrate the uniqueness of what they do and innovate to stay ahead of the traditional service providers.