Testing New Features With Creative Case Studies From the Comp Team
We’re constantly working on ways to improve Comp. Before would-be features become part of an official new release, we put them through the ringer with fun in-house projects. Here’s how…
After we decide on new Comp features to develop — which are often directly influenced by your feedback (we read it all!) — our Quality Engineering (QE) crew puts together their own mini case studies to try out experimental updates and pre-release builds.
“I like to think of QE as a voice for our users,” QE lead Thomas Lin says. “And the main purpose of these projects — which can include sample posters, webpages, and wireframes, and more — is fairly simple: Are we delivering the right user experiences that our UI and XD team envisioned? Can prototyping be done quickly by users, whether or not they have a strong graphic design background? This tells us where we are in terms of ‘ease of use’ of the app.”
During this process, we’re able to identify bugs and potential issues for the developers to address and fix before introducing a new version to you. But these projects are far more than straightforward, does-it-or-doesn’t-it-work trials. “The whole idea is that we’re not just putting shapes in there,” Quality Engineer Aygyun (June) Khaydarova says. “We’re trying to emulate how a real user might approach a project. It’s the only way to flesh out real problems.” Like most of the folks on our QE team, June has a creative background — photography and graphic design — which allows her to have some fun with her work.
Here’s what June came up with when playing around with image and text rotation, and image clipping and cropping, while those features were still in the development phase.
Once finished, the projects are sent to our developers, along with critiques, questions, and comments — plus, crucially, all the separate assets (photos, fonts, icons, etc.) QE used in their compositions. It’s then the developers’ turn to try to recreate the very same project, top-to-bottom, to truly understand the feedback, and any hiccups that need to be addressed. When everything is sorted, we’ll introduce this refined functionality in a brand new release for you.
Stay tuned: We’ve got mini-tutorials on image and text rotation, and image clipping and cropping so you can come up with your own case studies like June, as well as more cool stuff that our users are imagining — and realizing — with Comp.
Comp is free (!) for Creative Cloud subscribers* — download it now for your iPhone or iPad. Not yet a Creative Cloud member? Sign up for a FREE Adobe ID today and try out the latest CC apps too.
*Android users, we’ve just released a beta version of the app! Click here to become part of the pre-release program.
Check out our growing visual gallery for how-tos and at-a-glance guidance on navigating Comp.
Want to be the first to try out the latest Comp releases? Join our beta program for early access to new features, and collaborate with the Comp team in real-time on Slack to design and develop future updates. If you’re interested, fill out this short survey, and we’ll be in touch soon.
