How a strong relationship between Product Management and UX delivers richer value for Envato users

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Benjamin Mitchell

User Interface (UI) Architect

4 Dec 2023

How a strong relationship between Product Management and UX delivers richer value for Envato users

At a high level, the role of customer support is to ensure customers end every interaction with your brand happier than when they started.

Design has changed beyond recognition since we first launched in 2014.

Back then, Photoshop was the dominant interface design tool. Design files were littered across hard drives, servers and cloud-storage. The large majority of prototyping was still done using HTML and CSS, putting it out of reach for many designers.

The value of prototyping was yet to be realised. Design work was often presented in Powerpoint presentations, email attachments and PDFs.

We saw an opportunity to change how things were done and launched Marvel - a simple way to turn static images and sketches into realistic, interactive prototypes for any device, no coding required.

The ability to prototype without requiring a developer transformed the digital design process. Overnight, design teams were empowered to validate ideas and test their work across devices.

Without the overhead of coding, teams moved quicker to test and ship. Hundreds, thousands and eventually millions of links to Marvel prototypes have now been shared between colleagues, clients and developers.

Prototyping became a way to unify entire organisations around the product and keep teams on the same page.

We started to see not just designers signing up to Marvel but every discipline within organisations. In fact, 60% of Marvel users identify as non-designers.

From sales to support, we learned that every team had a role to play in building and shipping an amazing digital experience.

With that insight, we expanded the platform beyond prototyping with features such as commenting, developer handoff and user testing to help wider teams get value from designs and prototypes.

All this helped us grow to over 3 million users and thousands of customers across every industry.

Today Marvel is used within Fortune 500 companies, startups and schools, but we still believe our mission to democratise design isn't done. We want to help bring ideas to life, not just in the form of a prototype but at every stage of the process.

Now, we're launching the first step of Marvel's future and our mission to make design more accessible.