Discover Panel and quick actions in Photoshop

Project Outcome

A unified and cohesive search & discovery capability, that's easily accessible, providing a seamless way for users to find and consume contextually relevant content right inside the creative application.

The Discover Panel leverages Adobe Sensei's AI and Machine Learning technology to drive suggestions, and, packages hidden, high-value Photoshop features as “Quick actions” by simplifying complex tasks into one-click actions tied to relevant tools and in-app learning.

The panel leveraged Adobe Sensei's ML capabilities for quick action suggestions – a design problem that required thinking about how to make AI output feel contextual and trustworthy rather than random.

Oftentimes, creative enthusiasts want to ‘Photoshop’ something simple, for example removing a busy background from a portrait image. Some problems that they run into:

• Not knowing where or how to start in Ps

• Being unable to find the relevant tool or feature

• Being unaware of less complex apps within Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite for their task

• Switching between a web article or YouTube video and the Ps app for guidance

• Giving up when they get stuck, or if the task is taking too long

The Discover Panel’s search capability, help content library, and curated quick actions aimed to alleviate some of these problems.

Making the panel persistent and dockable — rather than a search overlay — was a deliberate architectural decision. It positioned discovery as part of the workflow rather than an interruption to it, and it gave us a scalable surface to add capability over time without redesigning the core Photoshop UI.

A user can now navigate to, or search for the ‘Remove background’ quick action and have a background-free portrait in seconds.

I led design and strategy for 20 quick actions in 2021, aimed at making features more discoverable, automating creative workflows, connecting tasks to relevant help content, improving engagement, and keeping edits non-destructive.

One-click actions that delivered an immediate, non-destructive result lowered the activation barrier dramatically and tied feature discovery directly to task completion.

A new content discovery experience requires feedback from users to

• improve the quality and relevancy of content

• reveal unmet user needs in the experience

• pinpoint opportunities to improve the experience

I was responsible for designing the feedback pattern to scale across different content types within the Discover Panel. This humble component lead me to constantly observe feedback gathering experiences around me - from dismissing a newsfeed article, to liking in-app informational content, and even longer form feedback on search results.

The final designs focused on:

• quick and simple binary responses

• optional open text fields for users to add details

• multiple choice responses when relevant

• an in-panel survey for more descriptive feedback

The pattern was published as an Adobe Spectrum contribution, visible internally on Adobe's contributions page.

Learnings

This project required me to operate well beyond a traditional design scope. Without a dedicated PM for much of it, I took on release strategy, engineering feasibility conversations, and cross-team content coordination alongside the design work - wearing the program manager's hat taught me that planning and organization are as central to keeping teams on track as the design decisions themselves.

What I learned is that design leadership at this level isn't just about the quality of your outputs - it's about keeping a complex, cross-functional system moving when the people and processes around you aren't stable. I got comfortable making consequential decisions with incomplete information, documenting my rationale clearly enough that stakeholders could stay aligned without needing to be in every conversation.

Looking back, three things would have made this stronger:

1. tighter feedback loops between design decisions and usage data,

2. better onboarding and awareness of the panel itself - it could only help the users who found it

3. treating content and design as a single workstream from day one

4. planning and organization are at the heart of keeping teams on track

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