The 2023 Product Vision
·˚ ༘ More sketches, background info and data will added here by 9/18·˚ ༘
As 2022 drew to a close and the product organization needed a plan and vision for 2023, product leadership was looking to refine and standardize their end-of-year strategy creation.
I partnered with the Senior Director of Design and other product leadership to build out cascading steps for executive engagement, product leads, product groups and finally squads in determining their coming year’s vision and roadmap.
After a series of product-run exercises and workshops which included my new Roadmap Design Sprint, each product group (Workflow, Content, and Growth) each had their own tentative-and-broad roadmap. This was a great moment for the Design Team to shine.
The Background
As part of the product organization’s 2023 planning, each set of designers ran their own Roadmap Design Sprints with their respective product groups. Each product group took a week to explore, refine and ultimately create a loose roadmap and possible solutions that they wanted to explore in the coming year.
All designers then came together, and with design leadership’s supervision, ran a week-long design sprint. Our goal was to collaborate together as a team, not only to further explore and prototype the top priorities and ideas for each group, but to stitch them all together and work as a team to guarantee everything could come together as a seamless user experience.
This prototype was presented to executive leadership and the entire product organization as the crowning achievement to the end of a year that was all about creating a consistent, cohesive product and tearing down invisible walls between the product groups. The Design Team and I worked hard to ensure our prototype exemplified the spirit of holistic collaboration.
The designs highlighted in the prototype are by no means final; it was never intended as a direct work plan going into 2023, but rather as a set of designs that will continue to evolve as the year progresses, user testing is conducted, and resources are defined. It also acts as a visual indicator of where the hand-offs are between the work groups, so that as designs do become more final, the overall user experience is taken into consideration.
A Holistic Vision
My designers on both the Growth and Content Groups had been advocating all year for a reimagined Home Page experience, both for visitors and logged-in members. During our week-long design sprint in November 2022, we were finally able to take all of our powerful ideas and priorities and explore the possibilities.
A few things to highlight here are the Content Group’s improved Search experience with Cross Asset Pairing, as well as Growth’s initiatives in driving users quickly and effectively to their logical end-points, regardless of if they are small business or enterprise clients.
During this design sprint, the designers from both Content and Workflow were able to dedicate design time and exploration to overlapping priorities, which included exploring the question of how Storyblocks’ use of data analytics could not only be leveraged for our content recommendations, but also how design could play a powerful role in garnering trust in this process from our users.
We explored things like user interactions, transitions, UI elements and our Data Science Team’s parameters to explore the possibilities in helping both our users and our machine learning in honing in on the right content faster.
These designs will be used in Q1 2023 for immediate user testing; the feedback will not only determine the Content and Workflow groups’ next steps, but also Data Science.
The Growth Group found early on in 2022 that users, particular Enterprise clients, benefited exponentially from an onboarding tutorial. The Growth Group and I also spent the year advocating for a dedicated Home Page design and features for members, as the current Storyblocks site experience has the same Home Page experience for both visitors and members alike.
This design sprint gave me a chance to facilitate deep collaboration with Growth and Content designers in showing Storyblocks leadership why a redesigned Home Page was worth the investment, and how we could seamlessly include onboarding for new users.
This design sprint allowed the Content designers in particular to deeply explore an abstract concept that time and again came up throughout 2022: Projects.
During Content’s Roadmap Design Sprint, the entire group aligned on a general definition of Projects, the parameters required for Projects to be successful, and a general set of features and functionality users could have by the end of 2023.
The Content Designers and I not only deeply explored Projects together, but also with the Workflow group, as Projects could be included and expanded upon in Storyblocks video editor, Maker.
The Design Team spent a substantial chunk of our week-long design sprint further defining what a Project entailed, not only for the core site but also the other products Storyblocks offers: Maker, the onsite video editor, and our newly-released Premiere Pro Plugin.
I oversaw the Content and Workflow designers collaboration and helped facilitate a seamless handoff from the users’ content discovery journey into the actual video creation stage. We ensured complementary and consistent exploration for content browsing, Project creation and utilization, and team sharing for all platforms.
so, What Next?
After first sharing our prototype with executive leadership and then then the entire company during an All Employee meeting, the Design Team received resoundingly enthusiastic and positive feedback from the entire organization. Never before had we ended a fiscal year with a visual, confident vision of what a possible goal of the coming year would have. How powerful it was for everyone to end one year with an idea of what the next year’s work would look like, and how meaningful it was for everyone to have a single product vision to rally behind.
As 2022 came to a close and 2023 begins, Storyblocks is now taking this prototype and slicing it into ownership responsibilities across the product groups. Many of the original designs captured here in this prototype will go on to user testing; the feedback and results will provide immediate direction for each group’s roadmap and prioritization for Q2 and beyond.
The Design Team will own the original prototype and periodically revisit it as the current gatekeepers of a consistent product experience. I am proud to say that my time spent with the Design Team and the Storyblocks product organization has resulted in a clearer and more standardized path toward collaboration and a holistic user experience.