Shutterstock EditoR

simplifying Shutterstock’s online DESIGN TOOL

www.shutterstock.com/editor

To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I’ve omitted confidential information.

MY ROLE

I was the UX lead for Shutterstock's design tool. I led the redesign of the homepage that helps users start new projects — where they can manage past work, browse template galleries, and find inspiration. This work reduced lostness and grew overall usage by 36%.

Impact

• Started as a 20% project and led to actual implementation

• Search completion up 36.6%, traffic into search up 85.6%

• Lostness reduced by 55.7% (search), 44.8% (setting a preset size), and 18.9% (changing font color)

• Crop tool usage up 25% after the panel redesign

• Idea we pitched for a free developer SDK is now in review with the business analytics team for production

Leadership

At Shutterstock's annual hackathon, my team pitched S-Free-K — a free SDK for developers, paired with an acquisition-focused ad campaign. The idea is now under review by the business analytics team for production.

Separately, frustrated that user research had historically been deprioritized in roadmap discussions, I organized and ran a focus group independent of my core project scope, then presented the findings directly to stakeholders across the company — building the case for user data to carry more weight in product decisions going forward.

How might we Decrease the usability gap?

Shutterstock Editor had grown a long list of features, but our data showed users were engaging with less than 5% of them, and most output was simple. The team's focus shifted to closing that usability gap.

The discovery

I use a mixed-methods approach — pairing analytics (Mixpanel, Google Analytics) with qualitative research. For this project that meant 1:1 interviews, usability testing, contextual inquiry, and a focus group. Every design decision traced back to a specific user behavior or opportunity we'd uncovered.

1. our users aren’t who we thought they were

Our existing persona described creative professionals. My research told a different story: most users, across industries, were non-creatives. They gravitated toward pre-made templates, recognized only a handful of standard design icons, and often didn't know how to start a design at all.

focus group

To validate this, I ran a focus group split into two segments — novice and intermediate design-tool users — and probed their backgrounds, workflows, tools, and mental models of existing software.

What I learned: these users didn't have access to, or a need for, expensive professional tools. They relied on stock assets daily but lacked the right tool for the job — often defaulting to Google Slides or even Microsoft Paint.

I shared five key findings with stakeholders across the company:

1. Unfamiliar standardized icons overwhelm users when packed into one screen.

2. Users don't feel inspired or empowered when starting a new project.

3. Users frequently reuse and adapt their past designs.

4. Core job-to-be-done: create high-quality output with minimal time and effort.

5. Regardless of skill level, users preferred having more capability available, not less.

Together, these pointed to a deeper issue: low self-efficacy. Users needed to feel capable and inspired from the moment they opened the tool.

2. Simplicity isn't fewer features — it's the perception of ease

Coming in, the prevailing stakeholder view was that "simple" meant stripping features down. My 1:1 research and the focus group findings pushed back on that: users, regardless of expertise, wanted the option to do more — what held them back was the tool's perceived difficulty, not its actual feature set.

“I like that this tool does more than Microsoft Paint. I don't think Photoshop is the tool of the future — it's too hard to learn. This looks like I could do what I'd do in Photoshop, without the learning curve.”

"This looks like a tool for professionals. I don't think I'll learn this any time soon." "You already know Photoshop — you can drive this."

3. Measuring the gap: success rate, time to success, lostness

To quantify the UX of the current tool, I measured task success rate, time to success, and lostness across our 11 most-used features.

task Success rate

Users struggled most with applying an image background — a 13.3% success rate, caused by a bug in how the art board handled the operation.

Time to success

Most tasks took 2–5 seconds. Three outliers averaged 30 seconds: image search, setting a preset size, and changing font color — which sent me digging into their lostness scores.

Lostness

Preset size had low lostness despite its long completion time; image search (0.77) and font color (0.5) scored high. This gave the team a clear, data-backed priority order for the roadmap.

The preset-size delay turned out to be a rendering bug: the dropdown extended past the visible browser height, so users on smaller screens or with browser extensions couldn't see every option — and went hunting elsewhere. Because the preset panel itself was easy to find, lostness stayed low even though time-on-task was high.

Users were lost searching for images because users were going into the Elements panel instead into the Search panel. This was due to the fact that users thought that the search icon meant for largely for searching, not images specifically. Instead users were going into the Elements panel and selected through Shapes, Icons and Emojis tab to see if they could find images within.

Font color lived inside a separate "Fill color" panel, next to the equally unfamiliar "Stroke color" — neither label meant anything to the average user, so they couldn't find it.

The Challenge: make Shutterstock Editor simple

Improve usability — redistribute, clarify, prioritize

The tool required heavy vertical scrolling to find features. I restructured the panel hierarchy, collapsing secondary features by default instead of showing everything open — a change that alone increased crop tool usage by 25%.

I reorganized the toolbar for clearer discovery, added labels, and renamed "Advanced tools" to "Image tools," regrouping Crop into that section.

I split "Filter" into two collapsible sections — Filter and Effects — and redesigned the sliders for better icon visibility and hierarchy.

I renamed "Stroke" to "Border color" in plain language, and moved "Fill color" into the Font section where users expected to find it.

Renamed "Search" to "Search images," since users didn't associate the generic label with image search.

Provide guidance and inspiration

Qualitative research showed users struggled to start and manage projects. I expanded the single homepage into three purpose-built pages:

1. My Designs — work management and retrieval

A starting point that surfaces relevant templates via carousel and lets users revisit and manage past work. (Editing/search/delete on this page is scoped for a later sprint, per our agile roadmap.)

2. Templates - a starting guide

A dedicated space to browse our full template library, which had strong supply but low usage — this page was built specifically to close that gap.

3. Discover - inspiration and learning

We had a large backlog of educational content that users never found. This page surfaces it directly in-product, and doubles as a showcase for other Shutterstock tools.

Learning

This wasn't a linear-workflow product — Editor behaved more like a set of interdependent browser-based apps, which meant close, continuous collaboration with engineering to land solutions that worked for users and held up technically.

Prioritization was a constant challenge. What moved the needle with stakeholders wasn't just the recommendation — it was pairing every recommendation with the data behind it. That's what actually shifted the roadmap.