Sharing

WeVideo Share

Industries: SaaS, EdTech, B2B, Enterprise, B2C Platform: Responsive Web

Highlights

Key leader shaping project direction & company future

  • Ran an extensive audit on current state

  • Strategic planning, decision-making, task-management

  • Established the company’s 1st design system centering

    WCAG accessibility standards

🔭 Initial Discovery

I audited the current product, analyzed data from the repository of internal user feedback, and drove project kick-off discussions with the PM, Head of Engineering, and Design Management.

♟️ Product Strategy

I created the vision deck the initiative to Leadership. I also socialized, identified opportunities, and drove collaborations across various cross-departmental teams. I created the design roadmap of deliverables and expectations.

🔬 User Research

I ran interviews with users, stakeholders, and sales representatives, as well as competitive analysis, and heuristic evaluation.

KICK-OFF [Problem space]

Scope based on Priority

💥 Impact

  • Reduced development time by 50%

  • Saved the user 22 clicks

  • Updated and expanded on Design systems

Summary of Contributions

📐 Product Design

I owned the UX journey end-to-end. I divided my tasks and delegated them to the junior designer.

🚢 Design Systems

I drove the creation of the 1st design system in the company: icons, typography, padding, patterns, etc.

♿️ Accessibility

I made sure the UI experiences followed WCAG best practices. I created a new Blue-lines hand-off process for accessible design including contrast, tab order, etc.

CONTEXT

Background

WeVideo is a web, cloud-based video editing platform supporting B2C, small-to-medium B2B and large enterprises to upload their content to create, view, and share professional-quality videos. However, the 10-year-old product had reached a point where scaling was no longer feasible with the amount of technical and UX Debt that had accrued.

Problems

  • The codebase was old and not scalable

  • No unified style or patterns - There was a mix and match of Google material icons and miscellaneous sources

  • The advanced features were confusing to students

  • Not AA compliant - Low contrast, small font size, incorrect keyboarding, and wayfinding/ tabbing, etc. (This is a huge deterrent for sales because in some districts, educational institutes have a legal obligation to be accessible.)

Opportunity

To maximize revenue, we decided to focus on the most profitable business vertical, K-12 education and create an easy-to-use video assignment experience for teachers and students.

Business Goals

  1. Delight - Become an EDtch tool that teachers are happy to adopt for their classroom

  2. Sustainable - Create a scalable foundation for our next-generation products

  3. Accessible - Become AA compliant

  4. Simple/easy-to-use

RESEARCH [Problem space]

Gathering data

I conducted multi-methodology research efforts to understand the user's core goals better and needs with specific research questions that we needed to get answered. After organizing meaningful findings in a spreadsheet based on features, I consolidated the analysis with recommendations, UX values, and UX priority ratings.

As the lead designer for the complex and ambiguous project with a limited time, I created a game plan for the designs and schedule based on the necessities for the MVP for our intended launch date.

  • Defined requirements and prioritized the most impactful workstreams based on our primary users (teachers) and their most common use cases and needs.

  • Audited of the current state: what’s not working, what is working, what we know, and need to know.

  • Broke down large design tasks and delegated.

DEFINE [Problem-solving space]

Multi-Persona User Flows

During a team meeting, a disagreement among different stakeholders helped me identify a critical misalignment in who our users were. To create shared alignment, I proactively:

  • Led a Proto-persona workshop with nine cross-functional stakeholders, delivering actionable primary and secondary personas with just 90 minutes of collaboration and two hours of synthesis.

  • Transformed these insights into strategic, user-centered journey flows, ensuring design decisions were rooted in empathy and aligned with business goals

  • Limitations - I knew that the personas would need more time and research to validate, but we were no longer blocked by misalignment. I had also identified a third persona but again with time constraints, I made a plan to return to the Persona research post-launch.

Methods

  • Investigate current data repositories and synthesize - there was already some user data and research done so I didn’t need to spend more valuable time and resources, given our short deadline.

  • Interview our Education ambassadors and sales representatives - a quick way to understand the teachers’ unique pain points and wants to define use cases and user journeys as well as to know their biggest selling points and detractors in the education space.

  • Competitive analysis - to see how our competitors solved similar issues in Edtech industry.

Main takeaways

  • Teachers often had to use time-consuming workarounds with the flagship product

  • Unnecessary features confused students, especially in the younger grades.

  • Accessibility issues made the product hard to sell to districts and excluded users.

DESIGN/ ITERATE

Lo-Fi: Brainstorm sessions

I quickly doodled some user flows and made sure the concept was working systematically via brainstorming sessions and quick iterations and turnarounds.

Design Systems for Speed, Consistency, and Accessibility

To streamline workflows and scale design efficiently:

  • I created WeVideo’s first design system.

  • Inspired by Google’s Material Design (a natural fit given our partnership) and Carbon’s approachable design language, the system reflected WeVideo’s brand values while driving consistency across platforms.

  • Every component was built with accessibility in mind, meeting WCAG standards to support inclusive design and faster development handoff.

TESTING

Usability Testing

Main takeaways

  • More conversational design to guide users through actions on the page for the first run experience

  • More controls for how teachers can add students

  • Enhanced editing control for users

DELIVERY

Hi-fi: Final Design

Clickable prototype

Impact

NPS of +33

After 6 months, we released WeVideo Classroom as a Beta to 55 educators with a successful reception. C-suite leadership commended WeVideo Classroom as an 'exemplary project' that set a precedent for future projects at the company.

  • A new code base that supported the latest technological advantages and features

  • Brand new scalable design system

  • Certified accessibility (as reviewed by Accessibility Solutions Provider “Accessible 360”)

Learnings

  • We bumped into a lot of ambiguity along the way. Instead of - We had to work lean and fast and opted for solutions that got us unblocked the quickest and noted when we would need to circle back t

  • In hindsight, we should have limited ourselves to Google material design for the beta MVP launch and created the design system afterward.

  • Prioritize quality over quantity: Eliminate flows if you know you can’t do them well/ serve your users

  • Lean is better than none at all

  • Sharing designs early and often with PM for awareness and with Eng for feasibility check. Because Eng was in Romania and timing was challenging, I recorded short demos with specific questions in mind. with stakeholders. I also shared the designs with customer service, asking them if they believed this would alleviate some of the users' confusion.

• • While leadership was happy with the app's progress, after speaking with the board they wanted to release the app earlier by 3 months to make an impact for the upcoming school quarter and give more time for teachers to familiarize themselves with the app before the school year began. PM, Engineering, and I reviewed the features but we decided it was too risky to cut from the MVP to make up for time. We compromised by changing the launch from public to a beta instead with trusted education ambassadors. This reduced the risk as we would continue to have time to test and iterate based on user feedback.