Claude Connector
Role
Prototyping Lead and Product Designer
Collaborators
C-Suite, VP Design, Engineering, PM, PMM, Corporate Strategy, Research, Content Strategy
Timeline
5-Week Sprint
Giving Creative Professionals natural language access to their Creative Cloud workflows.
The "Adobe for creativity" Connector for Claude brings tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, Express, and more into a single cohesive experience. I designed and prototyped from zero to one, translating complex multi-product workflows into a shippable MVP in five weeks.
Role
I was selected by the VP of the organization to lead end-to-end UI and experience design for a cross-functional team spanning product, engineering, platform, design, marketing, and strategy. I owned the full interaction model from audit through ship, authored skills and evals alongside my design teammate, and contributed directly to the production GitHub repository.
Problem
Creative professionals using Adobe's third party AI integrations had no clear path to complete a multi-step workflow. For example, three separate ChatGPT apps each covered a different slice of Creative Cloud, but nothing connected them. The orchestration layer didn't exist. And for Claude, there was no existing playbook on how to design a Connector, their platform integration combining MCPs, tooling, agentic skills, and UI.
Research
Research on those ChatGPT apps revealed a key problem: 47-74% of users dropped off after their first edit, across both Photoshop and Adobe Express. Users had no clear path to complete a multi-step workflow. Leadership decided that this was an opportunity to consolidate. The Claude Connector would bring all Creative Cloud app capabilities into a single experience, reducing context switching between tools, and giving users an offboarding path into Adobe Firefly AI Assistant for deeper editing. The design question became,
How do we surface the right capability at the right moment without requiring users to know which product is doing the work?
Process
In navigating this ambiguous project, I started by auditing existing Connectors and the Claude environment to identify gaps and existing patterns. From there, I mapped the full set of tools available in the internal Adobe MCP, which became the foundation for scoping the work. That mapping allowed my team and me to author skills and refine the experience around 8 key workflows, grounded in real product capabilities. I then built prototypes in Cursor, Claude Code, and VS Code, which replicated the Claude environment to simulate realistic interaction models. Those prototypes served as a decision-making artifact throughout the sprint, helping align PM and engineering. Upon alignment, I delivered high-fidelity UI for the full end-to-end experience. Before launch, I walked an external agency through the user journey to support production of the launch video.
Outcomes
The Connector shipped publicly on April 28th as "Adobe for creativity," part of Anthropic's Claude Creativity release. This was the first time in Adobe's ~40-year history that multiple Creative Cloud products were brought into a single solution. The 300-person team delivered 67 tools across 11 product teams in 22 business days. The work established Adobe's multi-product agent architecture and directly shaped the design and development of Adobe Firefly AI Assistant.
Retrospective
One of the most difficult aspects was designing for a platform that was actively evolving beneath the UX layer. Claude changed during the sprint, requiring a real-time revisit of assumptions about the environment. Working closely with engineers was essential to understanding technical feasibility. Since the MVP has shipped, I have been actively reviewing KPIs with PM and usability studies with research to identify the next phase of design priorities.
