From incubation to product launch, drove a new business opportunity for Adobe focused on the early stage of the creative process - bringing AI tools and services to concept development for teams. Managing a remote team while collaborating and influencing multiple cross functional stakeholders across the organization and interfacing directly with executives as part of Adobe's Incubator. Helping define product and business strategy, future vision, goals, roadmap and resource allocation. Building a talented and inclusive team that holds a high bar for their craft and the user experience.
One of the first things that any creative typically does in their process is gather—pull together bits of inspiration to help add definition to their ideas. It’s a euphoric stage where anything goes if it can be squeezed into the (usually) constrained amount of time allotted for concepting.
Our primary goal when starting Boards was to design a UI that would enable the two thought processes that people move in and out of throughout the early stage of the creative process : divergent thinking, the process of coming up with many ideas to explore possibilities, and convergent thinking, which requires honing in on ideas to find a solution. When we first began thinking about key concepts, two ideas kept rising to the top. Our challenge was to build an intuitive and simple product experience that supported both.
Exploration. Divergent thinking requires variety. During the creative process there are times when a user may not know exactly what they’re looking for, so they’re open to spontaneity as it may lead to a totally new idea or thread of thought. We wanted to infuse into our product that idea of “I’m feeling lucky” or “surprise me” to offer moments where someone can discover something delightfully unexpected. By selecting multiple assets, and remixing them, the technology combines elements from each selection, so it doesn't require explicitly defining an idea but instead leads people to variations they may not have considered.
Precision. Convergent thinking requires control. Users want the ability to remove, add, and change parts of an asset with a high level of precision and predictability, and to perform these editing actions in the context of their workflows, without leaving the application. Boards enables a basic level of editing (adding a style or composition reference to influence generation) but since there are times when people want to do production-level refinement there are also easy pathways to open them in Adobe’s pro tools.
Adobe Design Article - Behind the design: Adobe Firefly Boards. I discuss the challenges and rewards of designing a product, for the nonlinear start of the creative process, from scratch
