Audio Experience
Design Lead
•ADOBE XD
•GROWTH & Monetization
How can editing with audio be simple and quick for non-designers, yet nuanced for seasoned users?
intent
Make users audio editing experts
Adobe Express enables non-designers like educators, students, creators, and small businesses to produce high-quality content quickly and easily. Its wide-ranging user base, spanning casual creators to enterprise teams, demanded a solution that balances simplicity with capability.
The objective was to design an audio editing experience that integrates intelligent automation and AI-assisted tools, providing accessibility for beginners while maintaining creative control for advanced users.
role
Dream. Define. Execute.
I joined the team in 2023 as a Design Lead for the Audio Editing experience in Adobe Express. Over two years I collaborated with 3 Product Managers, 2 Engineering teams, 1 Junior Designer, Computer Scientists, and Content team to define the 0-n experience (MVP-scalable patterns) for editing with audio in Express.
From strategising the product and timeline with the PMs to getting leadership buy-ins through early vision decks, sharing at E2E walkthroughs at design crits, collaborating with the design-system teams to define new patterns and delivering final designs to engg. and constantly updating the experience through active user testing. This project allowed me to lead the audio design vertical by exploring new paradigms in creation, inventing intuitive editing patterns, and thereby bringing video and audio editing capabilities to a much broader audience.
design challenge
Audio editing for the masses
The challenge was to create an audio editing experience that could scale across skill levels, making editing accessible and intuitive without compromising creative control. Additional constraints included integrating AI-assisted workflows, ensuring low friction onboarding, and designing patterns that could be consistently applied across video and audio features.
Success required rethinking existing paradigms, inventing new interaction patterns, and designing a cohesive system that could adapt to multiple user needs while remaining easy to learn and efficient to use.
Design for all
Serve diverse user base students to enterprises
Balanced workflows
Beginner friendly while enabling advanced control
Smart AI
AI enhanced workflows to fasten the editing process.
Scalable
Consistent and adaptable across devices
strategy
Have your cake & Eat it too
The ultimate goal was of letting users create their own cherry-topped-cake at the click of a button. But we had to make sure we helped them choose and add the right ingredients, mix them together as per their taste, extract the most out of their ingredients if they wished to. For this we broke down the process into a non-linear workflow but every step setting us up for the final goal - Don’t just help. Serve! Don’t just help. Serve
Help choose ingredients
LOWER ENTRY BARRIER
Multiple entry points
Empty states
Suggest audio
Enable users to do more
ROBUST ARCHITECTURE
Simplified workflows
Single click edits
Fade audio
Slip edit
Same recipe, extra taste
EXTRACT FROM AUDIO
Enhance speech
Animate characters
Auto Captions
Don’t just help. Serve.
AUTOMATE
Sync to beat
Text to video
In a nutshell
Don’t just help. Do it.
Eliminate frustrations
LOWER ENTRY BARRIER
Support different audio types: Multiple entry points: Edit workflows are non-linear. And most of our users were not used to existing video editing paradigms. So, we laid out the foundation of the Add Audio workflow with:
Support different audio types:
- Suggesting stock music based on their file,
- Record voiceover over their video,
- Audio Add-ons like trending music, TikTok inspiration, etc.
Multiple entry points:
- Toolbar/ Nav: Upload media
- Media Panel: Access to all audio files
- Timeline: Empty states + Add
Enable users to do more
ROBUST ARCHITECTURE
The Audio Properties panel and the Timeline are the two surfaces where the user can tweak audio properties.
- Add audio entry point,
- Waveform to help work with audio tracks,
- Slip edit audio,
- Supported multiple audio tracks with subsequent update,
Timeline states
Extra flavors
EXTRACT FROM AUDIO
Integrated AI features to extract more out of their audio tracks:
- Animate from audio: This proved to one of the top audio related features as they could create animated characters from a voiceover.
- Auto captions: To let users create captions with in-built editable font + animation styles, transcript, remove filler words, etc.
Don’t help. Serve.
AUTOMATE
The north star! Add beats to their audio and Edit videos, images to chosen audio beats at the click of a button.
future
Scratching the surface
Over the course of this two year long design journey there has been a steady use of audio features in Express and an overall positive impact on the App. Constant user feedback as well as early engagement with users has allowed us to make timely updates, move goal posts, and realign as per the evolving creator economy landscape.
This is only a succinct summary of an entire audio design vertical that is possible to be shared in the public domain due to NDAs, and sensitive product information. To understand how we approached the challenge and strategised the journey of taking audio editing in Express from 0 to N can only be explained through a detailed case-study.