PicsArt mobile app design review in regards to a senior mobile UX designer role. To be used as talking points for an interview with some of the PicsArt design team. Review has some great user experience and interface design insights for immediate and long term improvement of the PicsArt flagship product. Contact me if you need a review of your app.

1. Picsart Review
By Jeff Bayer

2. ● Great, in-depth photo editing tools. (Image Creation UI/UX)
● Inconsistency in menus, features, user flows, visual design. (Engagement UI/UX)
● Lots of Bugs
General thoughts

3. Bugs
Crashes, UI artifacts, iOS feature failures, and ghosts of follows long gone.
Following 2
Showing 1 that I follow.
Occasional slow data
creates images that can’t
load without pull-refresh
or reloading the app.
Tethering connections,
phone calls, and anything
that forces an additional
top bar creates all kinds of
problems in lots of apps.
Probably more of an OS
bug.
Woo, crash reports.

4. Bugs
Can’t import images saved to iPhone camera
roll to mac via photos application.
Edited images / gifs don’t
interact well with other
apps.
**should probably have
more in depth QA. Sharing
via FB is a common use case.

5. Bugs
Web profile header (cover?) image is shorter on some
profiles.

6. Bugs
A lot of these bugs will probably be irrelevant if
you’re releasing a significantly new version.
Could use some more follow-up QA.
Specifically around image creation. Memory usage,
file sizes, app lag, etc.
Don’t worry, it’s not you. I notice bugs everywhere.
Neat ampersand

7. Inconsistencies - So many menus
Floating rounded menu
at top. With pointer.
Drawer style menu
from bottom. Rounded.
Drawer style menu
from bottom. No
rounding
Sandwich icon menu So many options. Floating rounded menu
at top.

8. Examples
Alright already, I get it, I
can go discover artists
from basically
anywhere in the app.
Discover Artists. The
same as from the
Sandwich button left
side menu.
Discover artists buried
in an overflow menu on
my profile?
This whole menu
seems like an
unnecessary extra step.
How do you change the
background cover
image?
**apparently by tapping the
bottom left of right corner of
the image. Discoverable?
Maybe, probably not.
Change avatar v1 Change avatar v2
Change profile settings
crayon icons/check
mark is a difficult
interaction.

9. Examples
Comments feel
detached from the
artwork. Probably due
to the new screen, UI
color and iconography
changes.
Why the multi-step
process to share to
picsart?
Choose from this
screen to share to fb,
insta, etc.
More floating buttons,
but now white instead
of translucent.
White background
browsing.
Color scheme?
Brand colors?
Black background Heavy gradients and
floating buttons.
UI probably shouldn’t
look significantly
different due to user
image size choices.

10. More Examples
Even the keyboards are different.

11. Improving PicsArt
I’ve seen this kind of inconsistency with all sorts of apps. It happens to new
products when design/dev teams don’t work well together or with iteration and
feature creep in apps that have been around for a while.
● How do we start to fix this?
1. Immediate action items could include removing multi-path features in
favor of the most used option for changing your profile picture or
searching. Adjusting the notifications push in to function like search
and cover the bottom tab bar, therefore removing the ability to have
multiple concurrent notification pages open.
2. Brand & Product style guide that defines best practices for consistent
colors, icons, menu styles, etc.
3. Post-development QA and design review.
4. Digging into analytics for better insight into how any why the app is
being used. And from there creating a new more streamlined, cohesive
user experience.

12. Really great feature set, however:
● I would worry about choice fatigue & use of technical terms for features.
● Feature naming can drive engagement.
Or removing potentially confusing feature names like hardness if favor
of more obvious visual clues. Photoshop does both in this case.
● Make things as automagical as possible.
Photo Editing Tools
4 menus deep alternating
top/bottom.
Why not simplify by removing the labels and making the
slider a visual indicator of the feature?

13. More - Live photo editing
Adding effects to live camera view - Why isn’t this named something brandable?
Perhaps “Live Filters”
- Arrow function bug.
- Why change from bottom menu to top?
If making gif/video content is a goal moving forward, the initial creating content screen
should be a live camera view (like with the gif maker). Perhaps some start interactions
showing new or mostly undiscovered live filters to draw users to deeper exploration.
Example >

14. Instantly show new users some editing tools when skimming
through the app store.
Current icon looks better on android without the white space.
Here’s a super quick example.
Launcher Icon

15. Please be sure to look over some of my specifically mobile/social design work:
http://www.jeffbayer.com/work/wislr/
https://www.behance.net/gallery/22936097/GoBoldly-App-Design-Mockups
http://www.jeffbayer.com/work/dealishes/
http://www.jeffbayer.com/work/tapestry/
http://www.jeffbayer.com/work/audiocast/
Thank you for taking the time to interview me.
I look forward to helping make PicsArt a more amazing product.
Jeff Bayer
Thank you!