Acquia · 2022–2023
Acquia DAM
Acquia Digital Asset Management (DAM) is used by 100,000+ people to organize, find, and share brand assets across marketing teams. Over almost two years I drove the user experience, including a navigation overhaul and a brand-new product line (Channel Portals), while keeping the underlying design system honest as the surface grew.
- Role
- Product Designer
- Year
- 2022–2023
- Company
- Acquia
The problem
What we were up against.
As DAM expanded, its navigation hadn't kept up with the number of features and assets it housed; users were spending more time looking for things than working with them. Separately, dealers and distributors needed a curated way to access only the assets relevant to them, without a full DAM seat.
By the numbers
The shape of the work.
100K+
Users on the redesigned navigation
1
New product line shipped to partners
The hard call
A new product, not an extension
The existing permission model could have been stretched to cover dealers and distributors. It would have meant teaching non-marketing users a tool designed for marketers, and it would have shipped faster. I chose to build Channel Portals as a focused product surface instead, giving up some shared-codebase efficiency to ship something genuinely usable for an audience that didn't exist in the DAM before. The tradeoff: more upfront engineering work, but a product partners would actually open without training.
What I did
The role I owned.
I redesigned and launched the global navigation for Acquia DAM, conducting 50+ user experiments to validate concepts and optimize interactions before rollout. I led design for Channel Portals, the digital catalog product for dealers, distributors, and retailers, and managed the Acquia DAM Patterns design system in lockstep with front-end engineering so changes shipped predictably.
Outcome
Where the work landed.
The redesigned navigation rolled out to 100,000+ users. Channel Portals shipped as a new product offering, expanding Acquia's product suite into the partner-enablement space.