Rethinking design platforms for higher education
ADOBE • SHIPPED 2024
ROLE
Product Designer and Team Lead
TIMELINE
Apr 2024 - Jun 2024 (3 months)
TEAM
3 Designers
2 Product Managers
5 Growth Managers
SKILLS
UX Design
Market Research
Product Management
OVERVIEW
I worked closely with the Adobe product team to increase user delight in the Adobe Express platform for an anticipated new version launch, conducting market research and analyzing student sentiments on content creation to ultimately inform a design refresh.
For the purpose of this case study, I will be focusing on the aspects of our product that touch on design changes.
THE PROBLEM
How do we make Adobe Express relevant to college students in the US?
Adobe Express is Adobe's content creation platform, which is available to many students free through their universities. However, Adobe faced a low adoption rate and high churn rate for their Express product. We answered this high-level question in two components:
How do we first get students into the product?
After we get students into the product, what does the product need to be able to do to surprise/delight a user? Through a feature lens, and a design lens.
RESEARCH
What's stopping students from adopting the product?
We collected 350+ survey responses and conducted 40+ hands on user-testing interviews of undergraduate university students to shed insight on this.
Investigating brand awareness, of 361 student responses, we found that:
48%
172 students have never heard of Adobe Express
33%
120 students have heard of but never used Adobe Express
19%
69 students have used Adobe Express
Complexity, Community, & Cost were the main barriers to entry. Potential research on how to clear up these misconceptions could unlock greater product growth for Adobe.
Question: Why have you never used Adobe Express before?
Summarized statistics from question on barriers to entry
Student discounts and more templates were reported as the greatest reasons why a user would switch from their current content creation platform to a new one, targeting our future feature definition and UX analysis to highlight these two offerings.
Question: What would incentivize you to start using Adobe Express?
Summarized statistics from question on incentives to use
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Why are students adopting other content creation platforms over express?
The majority of students use Canva and Google Docs as their current platform of choice.
The majority of students use Canva and Google Docs as their current platform of choice. However, a significant amount users reported using their content-creation platform because of prior exposure, in addition to a smaller learning curve.
Question: Why do you use your current content-creation platform of choice?
Summarized statistics from question on current platform of choice
The majority of students use Canva and Google Docs as their current platform of choice.
53%
of users reported willingness to switch platforms.
Opportunity: Fill the market gap by making feature offerings more accessible through UI.
INITIAL DESIGN EVALUATION
Adobe Express's current design could better highlight existing offerings.
We identified three major areas of improvement from our user interviews, and from our own design evaluation:
SOLUTIONS
We identified three opportunities to address the two major pain points: Complexity & Cost (in order to improve Community) in the three main areas of the product.
Solution 01: Text editing controls
Call to action (CTA) & Heading copy and title
Created button for free option as primary, reducing barriers to cost perception
Clarified the heading and caption paragraph for a more simplistic approach
B. Accessibility to Templates and Action Items
Changed the imagery of "What will you create today" options, and added a self-upload
Added template selection option proceeding for quick action and selection, reducing complexity
Solution 02: Push current offerings up on the workspace
General restructuring
In a sidebar panel, there is easier, minimal previews of recents and favorited files, reducing complexity
Users can immediately see templates and being the design process even upon not making an account, reducing mental barriers of cost and signup
B. Artificial intelligence’s primary text-based use case is front and center
AI is immediately available (text to template)
Solution 03: Text editing controls
Controls now conform to industry standards in placement and iconography, reducing complexity.
Most useful actions are always available in the top bar
More visual features have more space in the side bar
B. Artificial intelligence’s primary text-based use case is front and center
Users have space to input what they want from AI
Platforms such as Canva offer robust AI tools as well, but Adobe's is relatively hidden amongst other tools
IMPACT
SHIPPED IN 2024
with major changes to the Adobe Express ↗ site.
20% INCREASE
increase in website traffic since designs shipped
40% REDUCTION
in user task time to create a flyer in A/B testing
REFLECTION
Sync, sync sync!
Leading a team of different members with different skills takes a significant amount of communication, and is even beneficial to over-communicate in order to constantly stay aligned on project scope.
Get everyone involved in research
It's good to get everyone on the team who's available involved in research, and sync up about collected results. This helps the collective team have a better high-level understanding of the product and the scope of the situation on the whole - helping inform future feature development, go-to-market strategies, or designs.