Blings enabled companies to create personalized videos by combining Adobe After Effects compositions with dynamic customer data.
While motion designers created content in After Effects, rendering and personalization were managed inside Blings.
Although both products worked together, they relied on different mental models.
Motion designers organized their work around compositions.
Blings required them to manually create and manage another entity called Scenes before rendering.
Every project required users to constantly translate between these two concepts.
This introduced unnecessary cognitive load, slowed production, and frequently resulted in rendering errors caused by missing or outdated scene mappings.
The problem wasn’t that users struggled to use the interface.
The problem was that the product forced them to think in a language that didn’t match their existing workflow.
The Challenge
Instead of improving scene management, I wanted to eliminate it from the user’s workflow entirely.
The objective wasn’t to make users better at managing scenes—it was to redesign the experience so they no longer had to think about them.
Research & Insights
Through user interviews, usability sessions, and conversations with Customer Success, a consistent pattern emerged.
Users repeatedly made mistakes while preparing renders, often assuming they had forgotten a step.
However, the real issue wasn’t user error.
The product introduced an additional concept that existed only because of technical implementation.
Designers naturally thought in compositions.
Scenes existed only because the system required them.
This mismatch created friction every time users moved between creative work and production. The key insight was simple:
If users already understand compositions, the product should adapt to that mental model instead of introducing a new one.
I redesigned the workflow around compositions as the single source of truth.
Instead of asking users to manually create and synchronize scenes, the platform generated and maintained them automatically behind the scenes.
Rendering became a direct extension of the creative workflow rather than a separate preparation process.
Removing this conceptual gap also created opportunities to improve the overall experience.
The redesigned extension introduced richer visibility into rendering progress, simplified project navigation, surfaced relevant metadata such as version history and timestamps, and reduced the number of manual decisions required before publishing personalized videos.
Rather than exposing implementation details, the interface allowed users to stay focused on creative work.
Designing the Solution
The extention Redesign process in Figma
This redesign required close collaboration with both frontend and backend engineers.
Many of the improvements depended on changes beyond the interface, including automation, synchronization logic, and the way rendering states were exposed to users.
Throughout the project, design decisions were evaluated against both technical feasibility and their ability to reduce cognitive complexity for customers.
Reflection
This project fundamentally changed how I approach product design.
My initial instinct was to improve scene management.
The better solution was to question whether users should manage scenes at all.
That shift from optimizing an existing workflow to removing unnecessary complexity altogether has continued to shape how I design complex products today.
Impact:
Reduced workflow completion time by approximately 50%
Demonstrating a substantial enhancement in workflow efficiency.
Significantly decreased rendering errors caused by manual scene management
Related to scene overrides and accidental duplications, essentially eliminating such issues.
Simplified onboarding by removing an unnecessary product concept