Project Summary

Shutterstock, a large leading marketplace for stock images, illustrations, music, and video, has evolved to become a one-stop shop for creatives to build out their projects using Shutterstock pieces and editing tools. Shutterstock leadership team sought to understand how to create a space that allows creators to share their work on shutterstock.com to inspire other creatives that visit the site. Our team created a new feature on the Shutterstock website to promote creator work visibility and spark inspiration for other creative users that visit the site.

Our Creatives

We first determined whether we were even asking the right question. The entire design process hinges on us understanding creatives' needs, such as...
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1. Do creatives want to share their work with other creatives?
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2. How do creatives currently approach marketing their work and finding inspiration?
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To ensure the problem we were setting out to solve is an area of need for creatives, our team interviewed 6 creative professionals to understand their day-to-day goals, challenges, and their current approach to marketing their work and getting inspiration. We narrowed creative professionals to those who create digital work.

Insights from User Synthesis

Our compiled insights went under the following two key themes: creatives' goals and current approaches. This data shows that...

1. Creatives do have a desire to share their work to inspire other creatives, which matches Shutterstock's objective. This confirmed that we were tackling the right question.

2. Creatives heavily rely on online communities i.e. Instagram to share their work, get inspiration, and get feedback.

Exploring Social Platforms

As creatives heavily use online communities, we analyzed features from Instagram and LinkedIn to understand their benefits for creatives who share their work and get inspiration on those platforms. This helped us determine what features are useful to make Shutterstock a space where creatives can share their work that can inspire other creatives when visiting the site.

Features Implemented

Challenges

Challenge 1

To build out multiple screens for upload feature within the time frame

Solution
Condensed steps to get to the upload feature faster by adding it to preexisting publish option on Shutterstock Editor

Benefit
1. Reduced the time for users to upload work on the Creators Hub during user testing
2. Clear explanation of what the Creators Hub to help users decide whether they want to upload their work there

Challenge 2

Our team considered implementing AI-assisted key-wording, a.k.a. suggested tags, to make suggestions for users. But, due to time constraints, it was not feasible to build out as it was not a key feature of the sharing process.

Solution
Removed suggest tags as part of the uploading process

Benefit
1. Reduced development time to push out sharing functionality
2. Users had no issues with creating their own tags
manually during user testing.

Design Improvements

Old Design

New Design With Different Process

Final Design

Prospective

A key learning from this project is making sure that the design and web development teams are communicating early on to assess whether potential features are feasible to build out especially given time restraints. As Shutterstock is trying to integrate more AI, both teams wanted to try to build out an AI-assisted keywording into our design solution. However, upon communication before implementing the design, we saw that adding this feature does not further improve our design solution.

Our team still wants to undergo user testing to see real users' experience with the Creators Hub to get an assessment of its impact on sparking inspiration.