Unified Experience Team
The Unified Experience Team works to align the user experience across all the apps in Creative Cloud. I spent a year doing this alignment work, focusing on a set of 3 mobile apps that launched around the same timeframe: Fresco, Photoshop, and Illustrator.

Fixed, flexible, free framework
Getting three disparate design teams to align their UX patterns was a balancing act in many respects. Matching patterns in lockstep felt restrictive and led to designs that felt clunky in each apps' unique context. At the same time, designing without the ecosystem in mind created arbitrary dissonance for a user who was hopping across all three apps.
Enter the fixed, flexible, free model. This allowed us to create patterns that were consistent in their foundations, but also allowed for each app to flex to their own context when appropriate. Once this framework was established, many previously deadlocked conversations became unblocked.

Documenting specs
A lot of our work was documenting specs for foundational patterns. This made those patterns easily replicable by other teams, saving them the work of reinventing the wheel each time they needed a piece of UI while also keeping that UI consistent across the ecosystem.

Audits
In order to align the teams, we also spent a lot of time auditing their designs in detail, looking for places where they were inconsistent and suggesting patterns that would unify them.

Process notes
I spent about a year doing this alignment work, which was an extremely collaborative process across product teams and across disciplines. Special thanks to designers Brooke Hopper, Ryan Hicks, and Gabriel Campbell for partnering across the mobile apps, and to Paul Dorian, Troy Church, Brett Marshall, Trixia Colubio, Katherine Yang, and Matthew Richmond for their fellowship on the Unified Experience Team.
For more behind the scenes detail, get in touch to schedule a time to chat.