Review & commenting

Facilitating conversations during the creative workflow

Problem & background

A creative process can be messy and filled with conversations that happen between different people at different times. Ultimately, creatives and stakeholders have a shared goal of obtaining alignment and approval.

The Creative Cloud Review service aims to facilitate the different streams of conversations that are critical to the success of the creative collaboration. Within the Review service, there are four components: sharing, notifications, commenting (web & in-app), and viewing on the web. When I first joined Adobe as an Experience Designer, I lead design for commenting and viewing.

At the time of the project, the main workflow Creative Cloud users were embarking on was exporting or screenshotting artwork and emailing for feedback. Meanwhile, tools like Figma, Powerpoint, and Google slides all had integrated commenting in their tools.

Business impact & value

Help build Creative Cloud as a true creative ecosystem instead of a collection of individual apps
Boost cloud value of Creative Cloud
Engage stakeholders within Creative Cloud

Objective

The objective of this project is to allow our Creative Cloud users more easily and accurately share their creative work. We wanted to bring a creative-to-stakeholder commenting experience into our applications so that creatives can view their feedback made by stakeholders within their creation app. We believe that feedback should be contextual and seamless.

Our priorities:

Bring review & feedback into authoring applications —InDesign as lighthouse app
Enable version-based review
Rich annotation/drawing features

User flow

Creative finishes design in InDesign desktop app
Creative shares design with client to get their feedback by clicking on “share” in their desktop commenting panel
Creative can continue working in-app after having shared design for feedback
Stakeholder gets an email notification letting them know that the creative has shared their design
Stakeholder accesses design on Assets web
Stakeholder starts adding comments and annotations to the design
Creative can see the stakeholder’s comments and feedback directly in the desktop app

Designs

On Assets web, stakeholders can access designs shared with them and add comments & annotations. They can pin comments contextually to any object on the canvas or free-hand draw over the designs.

This feedback is then fed back into the creative’s desktop app commenting panel.

Features:

Access feedback in real-time in-app
Reply to or resolve comments in seconds
Filter by reviewer name, date, and approval status
Accept text insert or text replacement suggestions

Launch & afterthoughts

Share for review in InDesign launched June 2020. Since then, I’ve moved off of the project and onto the Fonts team but I am so proud that my first project at Adobe is able to solve a key pain point in designers’ creative process.