Adobe Express · Generative AI and e-commerce · 2025 to 2026
Designing how people edit with AI, and how they buy what they make
At Adobe Express I lead UX across three product teams at once. On AI Presentations, I defined how people and AI edit a deck together. On Print, I design the shopping experience for a new Adobe business line that turns designs into flyers, business cards and t-shirts.
Parts of this work are under NDA. This page shares the thinking; I'm happy to walk through details in an interview.
Project facts
- Role
- Lead UX Designer (contract)
- Teams
- AI Presentations, Print, and new initiatives inside Adobe Express
- Partners
- Product and Engineering on each team
- Timeline
- October 2025 to present
Scope
- 3product teams led in parallel
- 6regions where Print is available, from a US pilot to India
AI Presentations: what does "this" mean?
Generative AI can build a whole presentation from a prompt. The hard part starts after that, when people want to change something. If someone types "make this more formal", does "this" mean the sentence, the slide, or the whole deck? When the AI guesses wrong, it rewrites work people wanted to keep, and they stop trusting it.
I started with competitive research across AI presentation tools to see where editing broke down and where Express could do better. That research shaped the feature priorities.
Decision: the selection is the shared context
- The idea
- Whatever the person has selected, whether a text box, an image or a slide, defines what the AI is allowed to change. The same selection drives both direct editing and AI requests, so people never have to learn two ways of pointing at things.
- Why
- People already understand selection. Reusing it for AI keeps changes predictable, and makes it clear what will change before it happens.
- Select a text box, image or slide.
- The selection becomes the shared context.
- Edit directly (move, style, type) or ask the AI, with the prompt scoped to the selection.
- Keep the result or undo it.
Details that build trust
- Mobile presentation viewer. I prototyped and iterated a viewer for presenting on phones, including how to exit landscape mode with a gesture and a visible close control.
- UX writing for the in-between moments. Pending image generation, exit confirmations and announcements. These are the moments where AI products feel broken or feel honest, so each state got its own copy.
Print: shopping inside a creative tool
Adobe Express Print lets people order what they design as physical products: flyers, business cards, t-shirts and more. It is a new business line for Adobe, and I design its e-commerce experience.
The core challenge is that people open Express to create, not to shop. The experience has to offer printing at the right moment, make product options, price and delivery clear, and get people from a finished design to a placed order without making them feel they have left the tool.
From pilot to global
- United Statespilot
- Canada, UK, Australiafirst expansion
- Europenext wave
- Indialatest launch
Leading across teams
- Three product teams, each with its own Product and Engineering partners, and a shared design language to keep consistent across them.
- Reviewing and guiding the work of less-experienced designers, to raise consistency and craft across teams.
- AI in my own workflow: I prototype and explore with Claude, Claude Code, Cursor and Figma Make, so ideas can be tested as working prototypes early.
Reflection
Generative AI changes what people can make, but trust still comes from the basics: knowing what will change, seeing it before it happens, and being able to undo it. The same is true when a design becomes a paid, physical product. In both cases my job is to make the next step feel obvious and safe.
Next case study
Flip: fixing the last three steps before a saleContact
Hiring a Lead UX Designer? Let's talk.
I'm open to Lead and Principal UX roles, remote or based in Bucharest. The quickest way to reach me is email.