Bringing Client Galleries to Mobile

The Challenge

Unscripted had already shipped client galleries on web — a feature that let photographers create, customise, and share photo galleries with their clients. It was one of the platform's strongest features, driving meaningful gains in both activation and retention.

But galleries had zero presence in the mobile app, which is where the majority of our users spend their time. We'd actively avoided it, because the team held a deeply ingrained assumption: nobody wants to manage photo galleries from a phone. It's a desktop workflow.

The question was whether that assumption was protecting us from wasted effort — or blinding us to a major opportunity.

Discovery & Research

Rather than debate the assumption internally, we went to our users. Through a combination of user interviews, survey data, and behavioural analytics, we uncovered several insights that challenged our thinking:

Insight 1: The images were already on mobile. Many professional photographers use automatic camera-to-phone sync, or sync their media to their phone via the Adobe Lightroom app. The raw material for creating galleries was literally sitting in their camera rolls — they just had no way to use it within Unscripted on mobile.

Insight 2: Gallery management isn't just creation. Photographers didn't only want to build galleries on their phones — they wanted quick access to existing galleries to re-share with clients, grab images for social media, manage permissions and check gallery status on the go. The value wasn't just in creation, it was in having their whole gallery library accessible at all times.

Insight 3: A significant user segment was mobile-only. Less experienced photographers — many of whom actually shoot on their phones — were being forced into a desktop workflow for no reason. For this group, mobile galleries wouldn't be a convenience feature; it would enable an entirely desktop-free workflow.

Design Approach

The key design decision was not to simply port the desktop gallery experience to a smaller screen. The research made it clear that the mobile use case had fundamentally different priorities:

This reframing drove the entire design direction. Mobile galleries needed to be lightweight, fast, and oriented around doing things with your media rather than granular configuration.

Prototyping & Iteration

We explored multiple approaches through rapid prototyping with both Figma prototypes and TestFlight builds. This let us validate core flows quickly with real users before commiting to an initial production rollout. Key flows designed:

• Gallery creation from camera roll: optimised for speed, persisting the upload process even if the user navigates away or closes the app, with a focus on quick turn around so photographers could go from photos to shared gallery as quickly as possible.

• Gallery library: a scannable overview of all galleries with quick actions surfaced at the top level

• Shareable social carousels: the ability to generate an Instagram-ready carousel directly from gallery images, designed as a natural extension of the gallery view

Delivery

I worked closely with our engineering team throughout implementation, reviewing pull requests, QA testing the functionality, and making real-time design adjustments based on technical constraints. The proximity between design and code meant we shipped with very little gap between what was designed and what users experienced.

Impact

The results significantly exceeded our expectations — especially given that we'd originally assumed this feature would be a "nice to have."

• More than 40% of all galleries were being created on mobile within weeks of launch, growing to 60% after 6 months.

• Activation and retention both saw major lifts. Mobile galleries became one of the platform's strongest retention drivers

• Opened up new product surface area: The Instagram carousel export feature, built as a fast follow, was immediately adopted by photographers as a promotional tool and became a retention feature in its own right

Reflection

This project reinforced a few things I keep coming back to as a designer:

Challenge your assumptions with evidence, not opinion. We were confident this feature wouldn't matter. The data told a completely different story. If we'd trusted our gut, we would have left one of our highest-impact features on the table.

Design for real behaviour, not inherited mental models. The desktop gallery experience was well-designed, but it was built for a desktop context. Porting it would have been the wrong move. Understanding how photographers actually wanted to interact with galleries on mobile led to a fundamentally different — and better — design.

The most impactful work often comes from the ideas you're most sceptical about. Scepticism is useful for prioritisation, but it shouldn't close doors before research has had a chance to open them.