Optimizing Asset
Management for
Target's 3D Artists
leading design direction for
an enterprise asset management app
WHO
Me (Design Intern)
UX Research Intern
Product Manager
Software Engineer
TIMEFRAME
10 weeks
June - August 2022
MY ROLE
UX Research, UX/UI Design,
Competitive Analysis, Design Reviews, Participatory Design, User Testing Mid-fi prototyping, Hi-fi prototyping, Design Presentations
CONTEXT & PROBLEM
Target's 3D artists work under tight deadlines, juggling numerous assets to bring their designs to life efficiently. They need a seamless way to store, organize, and retrieve assets quickly—without disrupting their creative flow. When assets are difficult to find or slow to load, it interrupts their momentum, leading to frustration and wasted time. By improving the way assets are organized and accessed, we can help 3D artists stay focused on their work, iterate faster, and meet their deadlines with ease.
SOLUTION
Before and After
Original Gallery Desktop
Redesigned Gallery Desktop
100%
Users preferred the redesigned Gallery Desktop to the original
40%
Reduction in click-rate through Web-Desktop Integration
Scroll to see my process!
RESEARCH QUESTION
How might we improve the storage and organization process for 3D artists?
DISCOVER
Understanding a 3D Artist’s World
To understand our users’ language, we delved into a competitive analysis on some similar asset management applications. Alex & I tailored some of our user interview questions based on the features we’d noticed in our competitive analyses.
With these insights in mind, we met with seven 3D artists across the enterprise to understand what they needed from Gallery Desktop. This was an area for a lot of learning opportunities, as we had a diverse set of users; each team (Marketing, Product Management, and Supply-Chain), had different use cases for Gallery. The challenge was to identify which user needs to prioritize within our project timeframe.
To help us understand each use case, we developed two personas--one from Marketing, and one from Product. We de-prioritized the Supply Chain team since Gallery Desktop did not, and would not have the technical capacity to house Supply Chain assets for a while.
PRIORITIZATION AND IDEATION
Lots of Ideas, Not a lot of time
Though our user interviews left us with great insights, we needed more validation. I spearheaded a meeting with our Product Manager and Software Engineer. During this meeting, we asked them for their input on this feature prioritization map, where we identified areas to focus on based on their feasibility and value.
PRIORITIZATION AND IDEATION
Design Requirements
Based on user insights and stakeholder interviews, we redefined scope and started I got started with sketching with pivotal How Might We statements along with design requirements:
How Might We Statement One 🤔
How might we support 3D artists in maintaining flow when switching between Web and Desktop environments?
Design Requirements ✅
-
Users should be able to start a task in Web and continue it in Desktop (and vice versa) without loss of context or progress.
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Real-time or near-real-time syncing of assets, metadata, annotations, and changes.
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Allow bookmarking, tagging, or favoriting assets that persist across platforms.
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​Clear visibility of where assets are stored (cloud/local) and their sync status.
How Might We Statement Two 🤔
How might we help 3D artists filter and group assets in a way that mirrors their creative process?
Design Requirements ✅
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Allow both structured organization (folders/tags) and flexible discovery (filters, search, recent)
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Multi-select filters with AND/OR logic (e.g., “Textures” AND “Metallic”).
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​Real-time filtering: Results update instantly as users apply filters.
DESIGN
Co-designing with our artists and engineer
Our users had packed schedules and we were working across time zones with 3D artists in India; I needed quick feedback and didn’t want to fill up my user group’s time with too many meetings. So I set up an asynchronous feedback form to gather insights from our 3D artists. It was convenient for our artists and gave me the feedback I needed to validate best practice for home screen organization (with a specific focus on filters), asset detail presentation, and our Web-Desktop Integration.
The Asynchronous Feedback form I designed on Miro!
ITERATION
Reducing Click Rates
Do you ever think you’re a genius, and then show your work to a software engineer and realize that you’re not? Yup, well that happened to me, in the most ideal way possible.
Our 3D artists kept having to go back and forth between Gallery Web and Gallery Desktop to locate their assets, which added lots of unnecessary feedback to their process. To address this, I drew inspiration from Microsoft Word’s stock images integration and suggested a sidebar with a built-in Gallery Desktop integration.
Following testing, my users were ecstatic, my co-workers at our Product Design critique approved, so I had high hopes. But just to make sure that my stakeholders were on the same board, I checked in with Sean, the software engineer on our team. He was not as excited as the 3D artists were 😂
“Why don't we just have the Web assets populate on the Desktop screen when people search for them?”
- Shawn, Software Engineer
I didn’t even realize that we had the technical capacity to do what our software engineer suggested! I quickly pivoted and researched how other Target enterprise apps handled integration with other applications. I redesigned the Hi-Fi mockup to include a checkbox integration, which reduced the number of clicks required to upload an asset.
1. Open Gallery Web
2. Search for asset
3. Select asset(s)
4. Download to Desktop
5. Open Desktop
6. Select Asset
Original Desktop App
5-7 clicks
Mid-Fi Desktop App
1. Open Gallery Web
2. Open Sidebar
3. Select asset(s)
4. Download to Desktop
4 clicks
Final Desktop App
1. Open Gallery Web
2. Select Web-box
3. Upload Asset to Desktop
3 clicks
ITERATION
That one user interview that changed everything
During our last interview, one of the users shared an input that changed the scope of what I’d imagined for the redesign.
“Honestly, it’s just a mess. They could go all together in this clean little folder, but I eventually give up. I create too many files too quickly and it becomes overwhelming to keep it all organized.”
- User Interviewee
This 3D artist was expressing the need to have organized files, but he didn’t have time to sit through and sort each one. Gallery Desktop currently had a “Collections” feature that allowed users to manually organize different assets, but that seemed like it would hold the same problem 3D users were dealing with on their local systems.
METADATA FIELD SOLUTION
Collects data to automatically categorize assets
Helps users label and organize files
IMPACT
What our users say
Final mockups of Gallery Desktop!
“This is a huge step forward. The categories, file type, and moving collections to dropdown really help with the puzzle of navigation.”
- 3D Artist
“I like the usability and design and a lot better. I’m excited about the unified workflow; it’s nice to not go back and forth between Web and Desktop.”
- 3D Artist
REFLECTION
Learnings
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Get feedback from a variety of people while still in the lo-fi stage. Users and stakeholders have different insights on things, and a user may be on board with something a stakeholder is not; especially because my stakeholders had worked on the project for longer than I had, it was super important to get their insights on certain features.
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One insight from one user interview can still be a really helpful feature for others. I was super confused when at my last scheduled user interview, the 3D artist we interviewed shared an insight that changed the scope of what I was working on. I had no one else to validate the insight with, but as I spoke to mentors and other designers, I learned that sometimes, you’re not going to be 100% certain on something; you just have to trust your user, trust your gut, and test it out.
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Check in with the accessibility team early. This is probably my biggest regret of internship; I wish I had contacted accessibility early so they could’ve double checked the designs before I had mocked them up.