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Adobe Acrobat

Protecting PDF across platforms

Lead design from ideation to implementation across Acrobat services. 200+ new enterprise users since private release with a potential of 60 million + seats for Acrobat.

B2B Data security
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PDF is the world's most popular business document format. It's also the most common file types stored in SharePoint and One drive. And in many cases PDF files contains sensitive information. Partner with Microsoft, this integrated experience brings the same classification, labeling and protection from Microsoft office files to Acrobat. The experience was later nominated as “Security ISV of the year” by Microsoft in 2023

More at Adobe blog

🎨 Lead Designer

⏱️ Launched 2023

📄 Enterprise customers

My Role

Lead the design from ideation, iteration to implementation, worked with internal and external stakeholders, across Acrobat desktop to mobile, new and classic UX framework.

Problem & use case

A security gap

As the most common file types stored in SharePoint and Onedrive, PDF is not covered in MPIP protection, leaves a broken workflow to enterprise users.


😵‍💫

"My company has MPIP protection for my word files, but I have to use another tool to make sure the encryptions are there with my PDFs."

Business opportunity

MPIP has grown 60% y-o-y and commands 60 million+ seats.

As the most common file types stored in SharePoint and Onedrive, PDF is not covered in MPIP protection, leaves a broken workflow to enterprise users.

🚧

With 80% of PDF open outside of Acrobat, this is a strategic move for Acrobat tap into Microsoft's knowledge workers.

What's MPIP

Microsoft Purview Information Protection (MPIP) is a Microsoft rights management solution that enables a rights-based access to assets including PDF documents.

Visit Microsoft Security for more details

Design touchpoints

Meet users where they are

After rounds of ideation with cross parnter teams, we decide to design the entry point of this experience under Protect PDF tool, where Acrobat users usually go when they have any data/file security needs.

design reference image

Nested under existing tool

After logging in, entitled users will be able to locate the MPIP option along with other PDF protection options we offer within Acrobat.

Below are some examples of how this experience is supported across dark and light mode within Acrobat.

ship to store card showcase
ship to store card showcase
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Respect established user behavior

As most of our enterprise users are already familiar with MPIP workflow within Microsoft ecosystem, within Acrobat, we landed on an experience that is familiar but refresh to Acrobat users.

Design walkthrough

User first mindset

When we start to audit the current experience within Microsoft products and talk to Acrobat users, the current experience felt outdated and very permission centric, instead of user driven. After working with cross team to layer out the detailed workflows, I redesigned a refreshed experience to better suit Acrobat users with a modern look and feel.

current design
concept iterations

Scalable solution

Tap across devices

To better understand how this experience would carry over to smaller screens, I provided an experience framework/vision early on to initiate this conversation. Different use cases were considered as a document's reader, commentor, owner and co-editor. We also went though multiple rounds of design iterations to make sure integration features are logically and visually seperated from the native experience.

mobile experience showcase

Design localization

Accessible across viewers&languages

As PDFs tend to be archived for an extended time frame, one use case we considered is that when a label was auto-applied or when the browser no longer support this MPIP label, how might we help users to get timely support and know what to do next. To bridge this gap, I collaborated with localization team and provided detailed specs on how would this expeirence be localized in multiple languages.

design impact showcase

Illurstration credit: tatianastulbo

design impact showcase

Unique challenge

Dance within the pace

How to design and lead for a good partnership experience? We started with a dated experience, which has been out for a while with enterprise customers, and also need to work with different engineer, product teams, etc for difference platforms. After going through rounds of iterations. This experience was succesfully launched during Microsoft Ignite 2022 and continued to be improved until today.


Have a rationalized design POV

Designing for partnership experience often means double sized constraints: user expectations, feasibility, timeline from both products, hence it's important for the lead designer to have a solid POV based on our understanding of users and limitations. I really enjoyed the iterative process to collaborate with engineer, product, marketing and customer support from both internally and externally to build a clean experience for users.


Outreach to design community

While designing for this project, our design team is also working on a complete re-vamp of the Acrobat experienc, to make sure this project could be scalable in this moment of transition, I worked closely with multiple design teams to make sure all the touch points, components and workflow will be scalable in both classic and modern frameworks.


Raise the quality bar from E2E

We started this whole project with a quick sync up when the product team was still drafting out the roadmaps. As we dive deeper, I started to engage more stakeholders to this conversation to align on the overall experience and release strategy. Later in the process, as we had 3 phases of releases, I managed to incorportate more feedbacks from our customers to make sure the E2E experience always reflect customers' needs.


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