Simplified the Chaos in the Canva Dashboard (Featured Design)

Canva is a design tool for creating banners, videos, presentations and more. This screen is shown to a user just after login.

Task: Improve this screen, so that it appeals to users, both new and returning. You will need to priorities elements that actually matter to a user and at the same time reduce complexity for new users, with your design.

My Approach: Identifying the user’s problems, define preferred solutions, crafting the user experience that will reduce the complexity of the users & gathering user feedback.

User Interview: To understand users perspective, I interviewed my two friends who use Canva daily.

Insights from the interview:

• Too many options when starting a design.
• Difficulty in navigating the “Create Design” button.
• The existing users preferred the “Recently Used Section” in the first fold of the design.
• Users want a screen to resume work from where they left off.
• Challenges in keeping track of new Canva features.

Design: After getting the users insights I created two designs one with similar to the current design and second with a personalized touch to the user experience.

Design 1

Design 1: Similar to the current design

Thought process behind the design:

• Crafting a design that is similar to the current experience and reducing the prominence of the categories which will help the users in forcing on their recent files.
• Removing the banner to increase the prominence of the “create design” button.
• Making recent files more prominent as per the users needs.
• Making the search bar more prominent because new users share the template they want.

Design 2:

Design 2: Personalized touch to the user experience

Thought process behind the design:

• Crafting a design that is more personalized to the users which will help them in categorizing in their own space, shared files, exploring categories & new features to canava.
• Removing the banner to increase the prominence of the “create design” button.
• Making the search bar more prominent because new users share the template they want.
• Making recent files more prominent as per the users needs and also providing filters for a better user experience.
• Providing a text button labeled (Explore all categories) in the You might like to try section which will help the user in watching all of the categories at a time.

User Feedback: After reviewing both, users preferred the second design as it was more personalized and catered to their needs.

After incorporating user feedback, I submitted the second design to the UXHack website and was featured on their platform.

Thank you for reading! 😊✌️