First Sketch
Product Designer (2022-23)
Gravity Sketch is a 3D design platform that empowers teams to create, collaborate, and review immersive product designs in real time—whether in VR or on desktop—streamlining the creative process from concept to production. I joined Gravity Sketch as a Product Designer in 2022. Over the 2 years I spent there, we changed the look of the app completely, reduced time-to-value for new users by more than 50% and launched experimental features for our die-hard community members all while increasing ARR by 200% to $8 million in 2023.
First Sketch is the platform's first fully immersive, guided onboarding experience for new users. It walks them through the essential steps to create a 3D sketch. This is done through an interactive, step-by-step spatial tutorial that shows the user how to set up their scene, become familiar with the controls, and create their own 3D motorcycle sketch.
Over the years, a major drawwback of Gravity Sketch as a platform was the lack of a self-initiated onboarding process. Enterprise users were coached by the in-house implementation team and community users had access to a collection of Youtube videos. Neither of these tools were fully effective and led to a long time-to-value period.
Researchers have proposed that learners can generally be split into two categories - self directed and structured. Gravity Sketch's user base had an even split of both types of learners. Our challenge was to design an onboarding experience that would cater their the differing learning styles and motivations.
First Sketch would the first thing a new user would experience in Gravity Sketch so we needed to modify many of the design system assets to create a more immersive, guided experience that would encourage users to explore more of Gravity Sketch on their own.
We encountered a few unique interaction challenges throughout the design process and had to find innovative solutions. Many of these challenges involved breaking complex tasks down into micro-interactions & providing feedback to the user without interrupting their experience too much.
We decided on 3 key areas of focus while designing this onboarding experience to ensure maximum value for the user: Introducing the tools, creating a low-fidelity sample project, and cotinuous feedback based on the users actions.
