Building the Future of Creativity: A Discussion with Inspirational Adobe Express Add-on Developers
Get inspired by insights from the developers behind three add-ons that use AI to enable users to create engaging content for their projects.
We recently ran another Adobe Developers Live event, a two-day virtual conference for everyone who develops—or would like to develop—add-ons, plugins, or integrations for Adobe Express or Creative Cloud. It was a great opportunity to discuss key developer priorities and the 2024 product roadmaps.
As part of the event, I hosted an insightful roundtable discussion with these leading Adobe Express add-on developers:
- Kamile Jokubaite, CEO of Attention Insight: One of the first Adobe Express add-ons, Attention Insight is an AI-driven analytics tool that enables you to see a design through the users’ eyes via heat maps and understand which elements catch their attention so you can optimize the design pre-launch.
- Yihao Chen, founder of GenreX: This add-on is a text-to-music AI tool that enables you to generate music and sound from a text prompt. Simply type in something like “lo-fi music for coffee shop” and preview the music the app creates in your design project.
- Ketaki Shriram, CTO of Krikey AI Animation: This add-on enables anyone to create high-quality animated 3D avatars, which can be used in lesson plans, social media posts, digital invitations, and more. Upload a video or enter a text prompt and generate a talking avatar to add to your design.
Watch the full panel discussion here…
… and read on for the main takeaways.
How did your experience building for Adobe Express differ from building on other platforms?
Kamile: The experience was very easy and seamless but one of the key things that stood out for us is the amount of proactive support that we received both from Adobe and from Adobe’s community of developers. Every single question got answered, every single request got bumped up. The community is very powerful and helps other developers solve their technical issues faster and ultimately develop their tools faster.
Yihao: The whole process of building an add-on for Adobe Express was very smooth. We received great support and a lot of assistance any time we had questions.
Ketaki: One of the best parts about building for Adobe Express is that it’s a very customer-focused process. When we were first building our add-on, we were trying to decide how many free credits we should provide to end customers to create their avatars. Adobe gave us some great feedback in that we should think about the cost of these and how many we really need before people sign up and then begin utilizing the tool with an authenticated account. That type of product feedback and support from the team was really valuable for us.
The developer community was also very helpful. We were able to ask questions of other developers, get to know them better, and also interact with them throughout the process. So we felt supported both on the technical and on the product side by the Adobe team.
How does building an add-on benefit your company?
Kamile: It brought us closer to our customers because we strive to integrate Attention Insight into their design process. Most optimization engines target post-launch strategies but then the money has already been spent. For small business owners and smaller agencies, it’s very important to optimize the design pre-launch, and with the Adobe Express Attention Insight add-on, they can do just that. They can get instant feedback from their community, optimize for attention, and launch better-performing ads or creatives or, if it’s an educator, a better-performing presentation for their peers.
Yihao: By building this add-on for Adobe Express our product can get closer to the existing workflows that content creators or other creative people are already familiar with. At GenreX, we strongly believe that music should go hand in hand with creative content like a video ad, for example. So enabling people to create audio and sound directly inside Adobe Express can significantly help with their existing workflow and shorten their time to content delivery. That’s a huge benefit.
Ketaki: There have been a couple of key benefits. It brings us closer to customers who are maybe interested in animation but don’t have the skills. But it’s also taught us a lot about new use cases for our tool that we didn’t think of before. Our add-on is like a preview of our main product, which has a wide array of additional features, and as people use the preview and then come in and try the main tool, they often use it in ways that we didn’t even think of when we built it. We wouldn’t be able to reach such a diverse array of consumers if we didn’t have the Adobe Express integration simply because so many people are already using Adobe Express from many different backgrounds and when they try our tool and email us with ideas that just helps us build an even better product.
Have you also explored or already launched integrations for other Adobe products?
Kamile: We also have an Adobe InDesign and an Adobe Photoshop add-on. For us, the most important part is to be where the users are. InDesign is more aimed at professional designers, while design enthusiasts mostly use Adobe Express. So, for us, it’s about tapping into the different segments of our use cases and making sure that we bring attention analytics into the workflows that users are mostly following already.
Yihao: Our product started with Adobe Express because our vision aligns when it comes to making it easier and faster for content creators to create content. Now we’re also exploring building an add-on for Adobe Premiere Pro, as it’s the flagship production for professional video creation, and it’s very natural that a lot of videographers will need to search for music or create music themselves. Our tool can be really helpful for them to get customized music just by simply typing in text.
Ketaki: We’re currently working on a Premiere Pro add-on. Today, a lot of video editors might be interested in 3D animation but maybe don’t know how to animate in 3D themselves, and our tool would allow them to generate 3D animations with no experience at all. The goal is to empower anyone to animate regardless of their background, so no coding experience or programming skills are needed to animate.
This can impact many people, such as video editors, marketing teams, and really any company that wants to incorporate animation into their workflow. Even beyond Premiere Pro and Adobe Express we’re thinking of other Adobe products to really enable diverse storytellers inside of those products to animate in more than 20 different languages.
What advice would you give to other devs who are considering building on Adobe Express?
Kamile: If your users are on Adobe Express, just do it. It’s a no-brainer. Reach out to the Adobe team or Adobe’s developer community, talk about your idea and the benefits that you and your add-on will provide for your users, and address the needs of the customers. Just launch and test, and then you will tap into the many benefits of the community.
Yihao: Adobe Express is so different from many of the other Adobe products. The whole experience has been optimized to help people create content. With just a few clicks you can create posters or videos, just by searching for templates and making small edits. When you are developing an add-on, you should always pay attention to the general user experience, though. Try to keep everything as simple and concise as possible but don’t give up your usability.
Ketaki: Anyone who’s even thinking about it should definitely build an add-on for Adobe Express. There are only upsides to getting your product out there, even in a preview format, and starting to get customer feedback. For a small business, the most important thing is learning what customers think of your product idea, and it’s always better to put something out there than to keep perfecting it and wait for the release because you’ll never know what people think of it.
Our goal was to accelerate the time to market for producing 3D animations. It was a really interesting idea but we didn’t know if it would actually work. The Adobe Express add-on helped us validate that in just a few weeks after launch.
Try out the Attention Insight, GenreX, and Krikey AI add-ons right inside Adobe Express, and explore 110+ other add-ons on the add-on marketplace. Feeling inspired to create an add-on yourself? To learn more about what it takes to build for Adobe Express, visit the developer site for our documentation and resources and talk to us directly in our Discord community.
Watch the rest of the recordings of our Developers Live event on YouTube, and register for upcoming events.
