@ Piktochart
Piktostory
A text-based video editor for marketers — from user research through alpha, beta and a #1 Product Hunt launch.
Role
Lead Product Designer
Years
2019 — 2021
Company
Piktochart
Overview
While working at Piktochart I was tasked with the creation of a new product for marketing professionals. We interviewed 30 existing customers and field experts; the core product handled their presentations and infographics, but they were struggling with newer mediums like video.
What I brought
01
Deep Research
30 user interviews shaped the problem: marketers wanted to repurpose long-form content — often webinars — into shorter, personal, bite-sized videos for social.
02
Text-Based Editing
We rode a wave of new ML tooling that let people edit video via its transcript — highlight to cut, attach visuals to words — so anyone could pick it up.
03
Launch
We launched on Product Hunt and made it to Product of the Day, then prioritised features requested by early-adopter communities in our target audience.
Workflow
The content pyramid problem
Most of the marketers we spoke to were following a workflow called the content pyramid model, and had issues producing clips from long-form video content — it often required a freelancer or someone with video editing expertise.
We set out to create a tool that anyone could pick up.
At the time, machine learning technologies were popping up that allowed people to edit videos via the text-based transcript. It was a moment where new technology and our users' needs were converging.
Cutting
Highlight a part of your script to cut it
An important reason text-based video editing eases editing is that you can highlight parts of the transcript to cut, instead of manually adjusting the timeline.
Cutting a clip by selecting words in the transcript.
Adding visuals
Attach visuals to the transcript
Another key benefit is that you can animate visuals in and out by attaching them to specific parts of the transcript.
Visual assets tied to spoken words in the script.
Beta Launch
Learning what users prioritised
After the alpha release we wanted to learn more about what video editing features our users prioritised and in what order. They all wanted to add their own visuals — either as a permanent watermark or on top of specific segments — and had existing intros and outros they wanted to reuse across every video.
We also moved away from the IBM Design System and built a component library that could be shared with the core product.
The transitioning dashboard.
Release
#1 Product of the Day
We launched on Product Hunt and made it to Product of the Day.
After release, we prioritised features requested by our existing customers and worked with different Facebook groups centred around early adopters within our target audience.
Team
The people behind it
Project Manager
Ai Chin Goh
Lead Developer
Nicola Peduzzi
Lead Designer
Armin Jamak
