About: Making advanced video editing on the iPhone simple

Role: Lead Product Designer

The redesign of Splice increased the user reviews from an average of 3 stars to 4.5 stars, the MAU grew over 20% and the number of videos made and users increased by millions, with over 1 million MAU. We created a design that stood out from the rest and consistently held a top 10 in the Apple App Store Photo and Video category. Ultimately Splice was acquired by GoPro. I was awarded 2 patents for digital media editing Webby Award for best use of Mobile Camera I continued to work at GoPro and focus on: Unify concepts of Splice, Replay and GoPro Editor Edit long, 30min plus GoPro video files Introduce more advanced editing features for GoPro power users How to edit 360 degree video on a mobile phone

Splice was the first video editor on the iPhone, even before Apple’s iMovie. The founder developed it as a side project and let it sit for many years. When he decided to revamp it, I was hired on to lead the redesign. By the time I joined, there were a handful of other video editors on the market and we needed to update our overall UI to match latest trends. I was tasked with the redesign, managing the rollout, adding new features, testing monetization strategies and ultimately merging our app into the GoPro ecosystem.

Although we wanted to keep the existing editing paradigms that users were used to, we explored many different editing concepts: Object vs Time Based Timeline, Adaptive Timelines, single screen interface, wizard based approach, etc. We prototyped the most promising concepts.

We spent time early on with concepts in vertical mode, that would support some more advanced editing features from the current feature set. This exploration helped us find designs that were technically possible and made sense in context of the current design.

An import part of the process is picking your photos and videos for the video. Our solution consisted of a ‘mini-timeline’ that you could easily see the items added, rearrange, and ultimately became the timeline in your project