For nearly five years I worked for Vistaprint.com, first as a Content Strategist and later as a UX Designer/Strategist. During my last 1.5yrs working from the Barcelona office we acquired a Dutch company called Albelli, which focused mainly on photo products like photobooks and calendars. For years their main digital product had been a piece of desktop software called Photobook Editor. Its functionality dramatically outstripped that of their online editor webapp, and both had UX touches that felt years out of date.
I was brought onto the UX team at Albelli and was given ownership of all of the customer-facing creative tools. This involved working with Windows and Mac software developers as well as web developers and business owners on ways to both improve and align all of the disparate products under my care. Below is a screenshot of the online editor in its original state.
My most challenging and rewarding project was the full overhaul of our online photobook editor, timed to coincide with the rollout of a complex new product.
This was a multi-month project that involved many disparate threads, including:
Below are some of the wireframes that I produced, for the Gallery, Preview, and Editing views, from left to right.
And below that are some of the final screens that I worked on with our visual designer and developers.
After all of this work, we launched with a huge campaign in our Dutch, British, and German markets, with the remaining locales following soon after.
At the time I would have said that my most crucial takeaways revolved around the enormity of the undertaking associated with launching a product as complex as Themebooks. I grew to appreciate the complexity underpinning so many seemingly basic interactions, like the simple act of letting a customer draw a circle in a digital space and then ensuring that it prints correctly onto paper.
That was about 2.5 years ago. Since then my realization has shifted a bit to be more focused on user research. Namely, before I started at SVA IXD I had more confidence in "best practices" and bulk user testing, or a "launch & learn" approach. After everything I've learned from my MFA I've decided that my biggest learning from the project at Albelli was that we should have started with the users and let the design and product decisions flow from there. I believe that this would have resulted in a stronger and more successful launch. It also would have provided a much more concrete rationale for many of the internally controversial decisions that were made around the product.