The evolution of Viewst vision in transforming design for marketers

From Concept to excellence: the evolution of Viewst and its vision in transforming design for marketers. A journey from ground zero. Insights and challenges from Viewst’s Head of Product on building innovation in a startup environment.

As a founder, I truly understand the immense value a team brings to achieving success. When I started the company, I had a vision and a grasp of the market pain point we aimed to address. But having an idea is just 10% of the journey. Execution is key to a startup's future success.

Now that Viewst is gaining visibility and has built a substantial customer base, I’ve been thrilled to receive such positive feedback. That's why I want to take a moment to celebrate the amazing professionals who made this happen.

I'm kicking off a series of interviews, and my first guest is our amazing Head of Product at Viewst, Yuri Oparin.

Hey Yura,

Could you share a bit about your professional background around the time you joined our team?

I stumbled into design in the most interesting way. While I was in my second year of university, I shared a Twitter thread about how I organized the entrance of my high-rise building. My future boss noticed a design approach in my solution to the problem of a dirty entrance. Back then, it was considered innovative. And he reached out with a job offer! I joined his team to help develop software for electronic document management, becoming the first interface designer on the team.

I've been working as a product designer for about four years. During that time, I've had the chance to develop interfaces for an ERP system, an online national bank, and a couple of iOS apps. Then, out of the blue, a friend, now our former colleague, reached out and invited me to join the team to work on a MarTech platform.

One of the biggest changes in my work was developing interfaces for established and fairly large businesses, where the business processes and tasks were already clearly defined. At Viewst, though, we started from absolute zero—just from an idea.


What were some of the biggest challenges you faced when you started working on this new product?

Honestly, I went a little crazy! When I worked on big projects before, I usually had a product manager and an analyst to partner with. Having that kind of support from the get-go is a luxury for a startup. This time, I had to juggle all those roles on my own. These roles can be a bit at odds with each other. A designer is all about making sure the user has a great experience, while the product manager is usually focused on the economics. Often, these two perspectives can clash when deciding how to implement features. When I took on this responsibility,  I found myself torn between doing it really well and doing it cost-effectively.

I went bananas.
I still wrestle with this challenge, usually leaning towards saving resources and speed of developments. But I do dream about the day we can dive straight into the design process! Another reason we need to invest time in redesigning is that, after going through 3 pivots, we still notice some elements in the Viewst interface from the very first version that need updating and fixing. We've hit a few snags with the product's user experience, but overall, I'm really happy with what we've achieved, especially given our limited resources.

Yura, as someone who interacts with our customers the most, I have to say that I’m really excited to hear their feedback. We do get some suggestions related to UX, but mostly we hear about the value we've already delivered, especially in saving designers’ time. I believe this is just the beginning, and there's so much more we'll be able to achieve together!

Products that involve working on a canvas are particularly development-intensive and need more time and money. Just think about platforms like Figma, Adobe products, and Miro—it took them a lot longer to really take off compared to other tech.

That being said, we have plenty of time ahead to make improvements!

The second big challenge I'd like to discuss is what I call the "information vacuum." We noticed this as we shifted from B2C to B2B, and most of our team members were pretty new to the industry. While we've never gone through this specific process ourselves, we did gather valuable feedback from the marketers we worked with on our previous project.

When you look at designers, you'll notice that designers are generally more introverted and often busy juggling their ongoing projects. They usually don't have much time to join customer discovery calls. Additionally, Adobe tools have a long-standing presence in the industry. Many designers learn to use Adobe software in school, and most large agencies and companies prefer them. This makes it quite tough to introduce new innovations in this area.

In a nutshell, at the beginning, we didn’t have much qualitative data because we only had a few interviews with designers. Similarly, we lacked enough quantitative data since there weren’t many users at that stage.

From the start, I've aimed to create a culture of freedom and self-responsibility. Since day one, we've been working remotely. How has it been for you to develop in this environment? I'd love to hear more about how you've invested in your professional growth.

I think it could be another challenge for employees. As we mentioned earlier, in a startup environment, everyone wears multiple hats, and roles aren't clearly defined. Professional growth is another aspect to consider. In many large corporations, the company takes responsibility for employee development, covering courses, arranging mentorships, and so on. It doesn’t work in a startup the same way, due to limited resources.

Another limitation is that I'm currently the only product designer, so there's no one to collaborate or compete with to drive mutual growth.

That being said, I've had to invest in myself. The ambitious goals we set with Viewst require me to continually grow professionally. I'm always on the lookout for ways to grow. I join professional communities to discuss similar complex problems, trends, and solutions, work with mentors, and take courses. I don't have a specific strategy to share because it often depends on the situation and my overall mindset at the time. I just go with the flow and adapt to whatever challenge I'm facing.

We're getting to the exciting part now! Could you share some details about the platform? I'd love to hear about where we started, how we pivoted, and what our future plans are.

Sure, I'm excited to dive into the early days of our platform with you! Let's rewind to about six months old period when we had our very first prototype. If you look closely, you'll notice some cool elements inspired by Canva in the interface. Initially, we kicked things off with a B2C concept. However, even in that first prototype, the core idea didn't shine through as much as we wanted. The design had some hard edges, and the interface density was low, making it a bit clunky.

Here, let me show you the first transition from proof of concept to wizard oriented B2C:

Viewst first interface - MVP stage

Current editor UI

But here's where the fun part comes in—we started to pivot and make changes. Our goal was to create an experience that was not only easy to dive into but also felt accessible and friendly to everyone. We really wanted our users to feel welcomed and find it simple to immerse themselves in what we were offering.

So, what did we do? We started by smoothing out those hard edges and incorporating some lighter off-white tones to give the interface a fresher, more welcoming look. But at the same time, we kicked things off with a three-panel interface. Looking back now, it almost feels like a bad joke! Some of the changes stayed in the concept stage and never actually made it into the final product. By the end of our second year, we made a significant pivot to a B2B model.

The core of our platform had developed enough to start adding features tailored specifically for professional designers. We know how crucial UI is to designers—they're incredibly sensitive to every detail. Just look at the recent uproar when Figma rolled out an update two months ago. The design community on X had a lot to say, and much of it wasn’t positive. This made me realize just how important it is to adhere to established product design principles that resonate well with our users.

During this second transition, it wasn't just about updating the UI with things like a dark theme or more controls. We also tackled the exciting challenge of adding a bunch of new features to enhance both the UI and UX.

Our second transition from B2C to B2B vision:

First UI concept

We are currently transitioning our product into a truly professional tool that users will need on a daily basis. This means we're increasing the interface density and moving away from our previous accent controls. Instead, we're focusing on more effective ways to navigate and control the processes, like keyboard shortcuts and other familiar patterns that make the user experience smoother and more intuitive.

We're facing an interesting challenge with our current interface and product design. To be honest, our product is undergoing a significant transformation. Initially, we started with a loose concept and a small number of controls, which were aimed at inexperienced users who only used the tool sporadically and didn’t dive deeply into its features. These users were typically not design-savvy, and our tool was simplified to meet their occasional needs.

But today, we see so much more potential in what we can offer. We've fully embraced the idea of creating a sophisticated and feature-rich environment that professionals can rely on every single day.

For instance, let's take a look at our current top bar menu. It's already pretty packed, but we need to add one more button so our users can easily preview their product feeds.

Current Viewst top bar

Another strong point is that we'll probably phase out templates since most of our professional users don't find them necessary.

We're moving towards smaller and more compact controls.

New UI components

We need to add more flexibility when it comes to controlling typography. Currently, we’re missing things that designers are used to having as text decoration and some open type features.

Taking all this into account, I really honed in on creating a user experience that felt natural and seamless for designers. Our goal is to blend functionality with aesthetics, making sure every interaction on the platform is a pleasure. 

Yura, thank you for this interesting retrospective.

We’ve touched on what it’s like to work in a startup during the early stages, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on it again. Could you share how you’ve been feeling about it?

Honestly, I'm not sure I'd do it again. On one hand, I'm working on a really interesting and ambitious project, but on the other hand, it's a huge and never-ending source of stress with all sorts of limitations—time, money, people. It's tough for me to accept that I can't do it perfectly, but I need to get it done quickly and make sure it's clear. There are some areas where we don't fully understand the process yet and are gathering information bit by bit. 

Haha, no worries, it’s definitely not an ad for a startup!

On this high note, let's wrap up our chat. As a founder and part of the team, I'm really excited about what's coming up next!

Yuri Oparin

Product lead at Viewst

He started with development background, then turned into designer and finally came to the product management. Yuri has had a tremendous and different experience. He managed production in a digital agency, managed the development of different apps, financial platforms, CRMs and ERPs. Moreover, Yuri won in some hackathons. Yuri is passioned about building systems and unravel chaos.