Approach breakdown

When I joined Pixelbin as the founding designer in 2024, the product had already started solving real problems with AI-powered media tools. The challenge was that these tools lived across five separate web properties, including quick utility products such as erase.bg, watermarkremover.io, and upscale.media, alongside a marketing site and developer portal. My objective was to dissolve these silos and build one cohesive ecosystem that users could make sense of instantly.

Users could access individual tools, but there was no clear path between them. Each product felt like a separate destination, which made it difficult for users to understand what Pixelbin offered as a whole.

My focus was to bring these experiences together into a product ecosystem that felt connected from the first interaction through to the developer platform.

The problem

At the time, Pixelbin had:

• 5.8M monthly visitors

• 5 disconnected domains

• 70% missed brand connection

• <1% initial discovery to payment conversion

The numbers pointed to a journey problem.

We saw a 40% drop-off when users moved between standalone tools and 65% checkout abandonment at payment entry. The developer console, which was our highest-margin product, also had near-zero organic discovery.

The product capabilities weren’t the main issue. The experience was fragmented.

Our team conducted 35+ user interviews (internal+ external users) and analyzed session heatmaps and product analytics. A consistent pattern emerged: users wanted to complete an end-to-end workflow, but our product structure made them connect those steps themselves across different browser tabs. Users felt skeptical about product authenticity.

From separate tools to one product journey

I led the design across the marketing experience, consumer tools, and developer platform while working hands-on across design and code and guiding a team of five designers, animators, and engineers.

The first major decision was to rethink how users entered the product.

Instead of asking users to sign up immediately, I introduced a three-tier funnel:

Marketing Surface → Mini-Studio → Full Console. Each layer introduced more capability as the user’s intent increased.

The Mini-Studio

The Mini-Studio became the first step in that journey.

Users could access core editing features directly from the landing experience without creating an account. The goal was simple: let people experience the product before asking them to commit.

This created a more natural progression:

Discover → Try → See value → Sign up → Explore the platform

It also gave us a way to connect the individual AI tools to the broader Pixelbin product instead of treating every tool as a separate destination.

Moving from B2B infrastructure to a prosumer experience

Pixelbin originally presented itself much like an enterprise infrastructure product, competing visually with established CDN platforms such as Cloudinary.

I led the internal push to move in a different direction.

The new experience took cues from products such as Canva and Photoroom. The interface became simpler and more approachable on the surface while retaining the depth needed for professional and enterprise use.

Getting leadership alignment on this direction was one of the more difficult parts of the project. It wasn’t simply a visual change. It meant changing how we wanted people to understand the product.

Building the foundation first

Before redesigning individual tools, we established a centralized design system.

Shared tokens and components gave us a common foundation across the product, from simple one-click utilities to complex, data-heavy API dashboards.

This allowed the different parts of Pixelbin to start feeling like one product rather than a collection of independent tools.

Impact

The changes produced measurable improvements across the product:

• +18% paid conversion rate, driven by the Mini-Studio entry point

• -40% cross-product drop-off

• + $200K direct revenue impact (monthly)

• 2M+ daily assets processed at 99.9% uptime

The larger change was in how the product worked as a system. Instead of asking users to understand five separate destinations, we created a clearer path from discovering a tool to using it, adopting the broader platform, and eventually reaching the developer experience.