Canva case study

Currently at Canva, there is no feature to save a combination of elements user created as a whole. For example, if you make a combination between a circle, with a rectangle in it, circle and rectangle separately shows up in the ‘recently used’ tab located inside ‘elements’ tab, but the combination itself does not get saved.

Grouping exists to combine them, but that’s the extent of grouping, nothing more.

Let’s say you’re trying to use that combination in a different page or a different design, you would have to make your way back to where you made that combination, and copy paste it to your current work.

This flow of action, of having to undertake extra effort, interrupts the designing process, bringing a bad experience to the user of Canva.

This concept is not new to Canva, for example, in the ‘Uploads’ tab, medias uploaded by the user can be accessible and reusable everywhere, and any point of time in any design. Or even the ‘Branding’ feature serves a similar action, but just bound to certain things only.

It would add great values to users to be able to manage ‘components’ (combination of elements).

There are clear demands on this feature, in Canva reddit at the first week on March, a subreddit was open on this and the most liked suggestion / commonly suggested feature was heavily related to this. There is no way to exactly count the numbers of interest, but at least for someone who used canva for 10 years, this would be extremely useful.

Having looked around other softwares, no other softwares as UI friendly as Canva has this feature. Likes of Adobe and Figma both have this feature, and this even gets utilised heavily in team settings, where copy paste and locating the component isn’t so viable.

Canva has been thriving for a simple design tool for everyone, so a question was whether this would complicate things, make things more difficult for the users.

Currently at side bar there are 9 tabs, and this ‘component’ should belong in the elements tab. To be precise, above the ‘recently used’ tab. The reason for that comes from the root of this suggestion, where if a user componentizes something, that means they will likely use this design again somewhere, deserving that space above the recently used tab for which was also introduced and placed there for similar reason.

One of Canva’s biggest

Canva의 제일 큰 강점중하나는 방대한 library라고 생각합니다, 무수히 많은 template, media, elements들을 꼽을수 있는데요, 유저가 다른 서치 엔진에서 이미지나 element를 찾아 다운받아 사용해야하는일을 줄이는데에 목적이있어 보였습니다. Canva자체 서치바에서 전부 다 찾을 수 있으니까요, 더 빠른, seamless design experience를 목표하는거 같았습니다

이 기능은 그 목적과 부합합니다. 유저가 시간을 들여 만든 컴포넌트가 다시 사용하려면 찾아가 복사 붙여넣기를 한다는건, 마치 구글에 가서 이미지를 긁어오는거랑 같다고 생각을 합니다. 더 빠르게, 편하게, 방해요소 없이 디자인을 할 수 있게 도와줄수 있다고 생각합니다.

변수 측면에서는 과연 사용자들이 어떤 컴포넌트, 저장 양도 예측이 어려워 google drive처럼 quota, 서버 비용이나, 로딩 속도등 기술적으로 문제가 생길 가능성이 있다고 생각합니다. 여기서 더 가자면 현재 Canva구조에서 쉽게 componentize를 추가, 확장을 쉽게 할 수 있는지 확인이 필요하고, 다른 부서들과의 원할한 협업이 가능한지 확인이 필요할것 같습니다.