The problem
Animators spent too much time waiting to see their own work.
Complex scenes could not always play back in real time. Animators often created temporary video previews just to review a change. Research showed that the repeated wait had a material cost to the workday.
My role
Turn an engineering capability into a workflow people could use in production.
I led discovery and experience design, using customer visits, surveys, contextual research, competitive analysis, previews, and repeated feedback with professional users.
The product had two audiences: technical users who needed control and animators who mainly needed the system to work. The experience had to support both without exposing unnecessary complexity.
Product decision
Performance alone was not enough. Users needed to understand system state.
Caching happens in the background. If users cannot tell what is ready, what is rebuilding, or why playback changed, the system feels unreliable even when it is working as designed.
Make the invisible system legible without making every user learn the system.
Result
The feature improved a core Maya workflow.
Cached Playback shipped in Maya and improved animation productivity by about 30%. The project also shaped how I work on complex products: measure the real workflow, test with expert users, and treat trust as part of the product requirement.
What this demonstrates
Enterprise product discovery, technical translation, customer-facing execution, cross-functional delivery, competitive analysis, and measurable workflow impact.