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PROJECT
Re-invented the photo book creation process for users on mobile and desktop
ROLE
Senior Product Designer
TLDR
One of my most challenging projects at Chatbooks was redesigning the book edit experience from the ground up. Chatbooks offers both subscription and non-subscription products, but over time, we ended up with five different, inconsistent editing flows. These fragmented systems became clunky, slow, and riddled with bugs due to continuous patchwork iterations. My task was to unify these experiences into a seamless, efficient interface—improving usability, performance, and consistency across all product lines.
RESULTS
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Achieved a 13% increase in print rates across all product lines.
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Improved user experience by reducing "not easy" feedback from 25% to 15% within the first three months.
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Cut book edit-related support tickets by 30%, streamlining customer service efforts.
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Acheived a cohesive experience across five product lines, ensuring seamless functionality on iOS, Android, and Web platforms.
Getting Started
25% of our users found it "not easy" to create their books in our app.
With "easy" being a pillar at Chatbooks my primary goal was to reduce that number.
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I took on the project with the intention to
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Unify the experiences between products
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Create a solution for our users to create books with ease
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Reduce friction and identify bugs throughout
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I began by conducting an audit of our existing user experience and collaborated with our insights team to identify areas of friction. I cataloged all the features across various experiences and categorized those that had similarities. Visualizing the current user journey I was able to illustrate the number of interactions required to access each feature. Additionally, I highlighted instances where multiple pathways led to the same feature.
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It looked like this...
Taking a Manual Approach
I decided to also take a non-digital approach to the problem aiming to stimulate a fresh perspective. I made a photo book at home. I wanted to observe and note the steps I took with a physical book to see if I could find overlap that I could create within our app.
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This is the process I took:
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Design Process
With all of the framework laid out, I started deconstructing our current experience and grouped together which features could make sense together, looking for trends. I boiled it down to two things:
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Overall book edit actions
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Specific page actions
I also wanted to consider that "Refine" step which was absent in our current app but surfaced during the manual book creation process.
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With that information I added a book tray, a solution that could be the "Refine" in the book creation process that could help users narrow down further from a large group of photos.
This refine step also helped our developers sync photos into the book quicker.
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This is a high level overview of what the final design looks like with all of the edit actions laid out.
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This streamlined design enabled us to offer a unified book editing experience while making minor adjustments for our various product lines.
