DIY Animated Video Platform

Vyond is a leading DIY animated video SAAS platform for B2C and B2B.

🔍 Background & Context

I joined Vyond in the Hong Kong office in the early days when the company was at an turning point, approaching product-market fit. Our team was lean — 3 designers among approx. 30 employees. We were deeply hands-on and cross-functional, working closely with colleagues in Taiwan and San Francisco.

During this period, I helped lay the groundwork for scalable product design as the company doubled in size annually. Some key contributions included:

• Establishing a design process: We moved from ad-hoc design to structured workflows, improving alignment between product, design, and engineering.
• Improving usability: Regular user testing uncovered friction points, informed iteration, and helped nurture a more user-centric culture across departments.
• User onboarding: We mapped user journeys to streamline onboarding, reducing churn and increasing feature adoption.
• Pattern consistency: I designed and documented reusable interaction patterns, ensuring cohesive experiences and faster handoffs.

🔧 Process & Approach

We applied a Double Diamond framework to move from ambiguity to clarity:

1. Discover: Research & Audits

• Identified three key user personas (see below) with distinct goals and tasks to prioritize usability improvements and define content structure.
• Conducted user interviews and usability tests, uncovering critical navigation pain points.
• Ran a content audit to map relationships between assets, components, and screens, identifying redundancies and opportunities.

2. Define: Problem Framing

As the app’s complexity grew, so did its usability challenges:

1. Fragmented navigation made content discovery difficult.
2. Inconsistent structures across tools and panels slowed experienced users and overwhelmed new ones.
3. Designers were shipping features without considering the global IA, making scalability difficult.

3. Develop: Systemic Pattern Design

• I created a modular interaction design pattern to unify navigation and asset management.
• The system scaled across user types — from beginners to power users — and supported the needs of both creators and managers.
• These patterns were documented and shared across teams to support parallel development and maintain consistency.

4. Deliver: Testing & Validation

With the updated pattern, we conducted further user tests, which showed increased task completion rates. We shared results in cross-functional reviews to build support and encourage reuse across teams.

📹 Example: Pattern in Action (26s)

Design pattern in action, demonstrating how users browse, apply, save, and reuse colors.

💬 Reflections

One of the toughest challenges was advocating for architectural change late in the development cycle. Redesigning foundational structures requires stakeholder alignment, patience, and diplomacy. But that shift ultimately helped the team work with clearer constraints and freeing up time to work on deeper user problems.