Kat McGowan Learning & product design

← UX & product

  • Product design
  • Figma
  • User testing

Canvas: a multi-view QA tool to simplify creative review

My role
Lead designer
Responsibilities
End-to-end UX & UI, stakeholder management, user testing
Collaborators
Production leads, engineering, PM, SLT
Timeline
6 weeks

Overview

Our production teams were using a single-deliverable review view — not ideal for reviewing creative campaigns as a set. To QA multiple assets, they used time-consuming workarounds.

I led the design of Canvas, a multi-view QA tool that improved review speed by around 25%, reduced repeat errors, and quickly became the go-to solution for internal and client-facing teams. We shipped the MVP in under six weeks.

The Canvas MVP: a dark canvas workspace showing a grid of video and still deliverables laid out side by side for review, with a project panel on the left.
Canvas final MVP.

The problem

The existing QA tool only supported 1-up viewing, which meant campaigns had to be reviewed one deliverable at a time — even though consistency across deliverables was the whole point. This caused repeated brand errors, manual workarounds like screenshots and third-party tools, slower QA, and growing frustration for internal teams.

Discovery & prioritisation

Stakeholders had a long wish-list, but our timeline was short.

I worked with the project engineer to evaluate features by technical effort vs. user value, and proposed a tightly scoped MVP. I collaborated closely with:

  • QA teams to understand pain points
  • Engineers to validate feasibility
  • PM to align on priorities and communication
  • QA analyst to write acceptance criteria

I also ran a light competitor analysis across canvas tools and creative review tools. There was plenty of crossover with canvas tools like Figma and Miro, and review tools like Frame.io — but nothing combining the two into a proper review experience within a canvas.

Some of our considerations were:

  • How to handle large-scale projects with 200+ assets
  • Page load performance and UI clarity when displaying many assets
  • Integration of the existing 1-up and version compare with this new tool
  • Defining the naming and product positioning of a brand new tool
A grid of sticky notes capturing open questions about the tool, such as how to view multiple deliverables within a project, whether to display assets at different ratios, and how to handle scaling.
Gathering requirements and questions.

Key design decisions

Internal feedback from the QA and production teams shaped the MVP. We determined that the maximum useful number for reviewing together was around 12 assets, and that global player controls for video would be genuinely useful. Other decisions included:

  • No new components: used existing panel UI to reduce dev lift
  • Deliverable order: matched Canvas layout to left-panel order for intuitive scanning
  • Ruler tool: added after hearing users were installing Chrome extensions to measure assets
  • Draggable layout: let QA teams visually group and compare assets with ease
The canvas with one asset highlighted on hover, its corresponding row picked out in the left-hand deliverables panel.
Hover to highlight an asset on the canvas.
An asset being dragged across the canvas with a red safe-zone rectangle overlaid on top of another deliverable.
Dragging assets to the canvas for overlays or safe zones.
The finished Canvas in use: a larger review set spread across the workspace, with two concepts grouped and a video deliverable selected.
Final Canvas.

Outcome

  • Shipped the MVP in under six weeks
  • Reduced QA time by around 25%
  • Replaced manual QA workarounds
  • Became a core tool for both internal QA and client-facing production workflows
  • Provided a foundation for ongoing iteration and refinement
Six messages from the production team reacting to Canvas going live, from a junior producer, two team leads, the VP of creative operations, and the head of traffic and QA.
Reactions from the production and traffic teams as Canvas went live.

Reflection

Canvas was a classic “tight scope, high impact” win. But more than that, it showed how aligning early on priorities, bringing stakeholders along with transparency, and designing within constraints can result in something simple, powerful, and widely adopted.

I’m currently working on the next iteration of this feature, to incorporate 1-up view, version compare, and adding revisions within the same view.