Shutterstock — BSTN4D
3 min readMar 9, 2021
Shutterstock and Brainstation teamed up to create a design challenge that gave me the opportunity to work closely with web developers, data scientists, and other UX designers to come up with a solution all within 24 hours.
Shutterstock’s Design Question
How can Shutterstock leverage data and insights to create a competitive advantage? And how can data and insights be uniquely woven into the experience to offer a differentiated and desirable experience for our users?
How might we?
How might we leverage data to help content creators understand the feel of a track so that they can more efficiently browse through audio on Shutterstock?
Secondary Research
- 89% of marketers say video gives them good ROI
- 80% of video marketers say video has directly helped increase sales
- 50% of gen Z and millennials are set on creating content on social media for their livelihood.
The opportunity
- Enable content creators to efficiently find the multimedia assets they need for their creative work by pro dividing a cohesive audio-visual experience.
- Design a more intuitive experience for non-technical content creators by leveraging common keywords found in the data to enhance the user experience.
- Optimize the presentation of available audio tracks to visually and more efficiently convey their mood and tone before being played by pairing them with relevant images
We went forward by re-designing the layout to make it more engaging and easy to understand for users.
Our solution involved pairing the necessary information with relevant images so we could visually convey the vibe. This was done by cross-checking common/overlapping keywords and data associated with the audio track and images.
Success Metrics
- number of downloads
- time tracking on page/content
- engagement (clicks, saves, etc.)
Next Steps
- Explore more real-life examples as inspiration
- Search for similar music/sound/beat effects — based on your personal links or uploads
