Too Many Tools

The video editing workflow is fragmented. Teams are forced to juggle separate tools for feedback, tasks, and communication, losing critical context with every switch.

Enter Pactto: One Room, Full Story

Pactto unifies live conferencing and the entire video editing workflow into a single, canvas-based “Room.” It replaces scattered tools with one intelligent space where feedback, decisions, and production happen together.

Validating the Friction

We synthesized our research into an affinity map. While we uncovered several friction points, we prioritized one key insight to tackle first.

Deep Dive: Is Pactto a conferencing or collaboration tool?

When I first joined, Pactto faced a core positioning dilemma: compete as a conferencing app or a collaboration workspace.

I initially advocated for the conferencing route based on competitive defensibility. Legacy tools like Zoom and Teams would struggle to copy our unique Canvas UI without completely breaking their users' established cognitive models. In contrast, competing as a collaboration tool meant facing off against giants like Miro and FigJam, who already owned the canvas format and simply needed to add a video call feature to close the gap.

However, after realigning with the founders, we committed to the collaboration model. The business strategy was to scale vertically (targeting specific creative workflows) rather than horizontally (building a generic meeting tool for everyone). Returning to our primary goal of reducing tool-switching, we realized Pactto couldn't just be a temporary meeting link. It needed to be the persistent, singular home where the entire end-to-end workflow actually happens.

The Problem We Focused On

We synthesized our research into an affinity map, where one key insight stood out as the root cause of the fragmentation.

User Insights: Beyond the Async Gap

While our primary objective was solving the asynchronous feedback gap, our research uncovered three additional insights that heavily influenced our final design.

Cognitive Load of the Canvas: Video editors found the infinite canvas “alien” because they are accustomed to working inside linear timelines. This paradigm shift meant we needed to provide structured starting spaces to reduce initial friction.

The Need for Presentation Control: Presenters lost their flow when audience members jumped ahead or crowded the screen with cursors. Users explicitly noted they needed to control the pace to prevent visual chaos and maintain sharp, focused feedback.

AI for Admin, Not Art: Creatives firmly stated they want AI to handle administrative tasks rather than generative creative work. They highly valued tools that quietly turn conversations into itemized notes so they can stay in their flow state.

This question guided the design of our core feature: a unified intelligent canvas where feedback organizes itself.

We took an Iterative Approach

We followed a classic iterative design approach, testing and updating our prototypes on a rigorous weekly cycle to ensure constant validation.

Accelerating Prototyping with AI

Our stakeholder cycle required us to present functional features every week. Static mocks couldn't capture the complexity of video scrubbing or interaction timing, so we inverted the traditional workflow.

Instead of perfecting pixels first, we used Google AI Studio to “vibe code” functional prototypes.

Designing for Expressive Feedback

Defining the MVP Together

We ran group reviews in Google Sheets, weighing Priority against Effort to decide what was critical for the Open Beta and what could wait.

Prioritizing Async Collaboration

With the live tools already stable, the Commenting Suite became our absolute P0: a persistent feedback layer sitting alongside the real-time workflow.

Rejected Idea: The Collapsible Sidebar Proposal

The original top-anchored webcams ate a third of the screen and stole focus from the canvas. They also failed to scale: at twenty people the strip collapsed over the presentation.

I designed a collapsible sidebar for the feeds, like Google Meet, letting users hide the webcams entirely and focus on the work.

Stakeholders rejected it. Human connection was meant to be an unavoidable pillar of Pactto, and hiding the feeds undermined that.

So the cameras scale instead of hiding. The more people join, the smaller each feed becomes, so the container never grows, so the room stays human without costing canvas.

Foundations: Contextual Commenting

We designed three distinct commenting primitives to handle every type of creative feedback:

Design Decision: The “Comment vs. Task” Friction

The crossroads: generic comments like Figma's, or strict accountability. For video editors generic simplicity caused paralysis: no way to tell a casual “maybe” from a critical “must-do” in a flood of feedback.

Pactto Intelligence: Smart Voice

While we developed a suite of AI tools, I want to highlight Smart Voice, the feature that solves the conflict between speed and documentation.

The Handoff: From Prototype to Production

Key Takeaway

Unfortunately I couldn’t make it in person, so please enjoy these completely un-edited photographs of me with the team.

The Search Damages Mental Health

We started with published surveys. They show that the job search harms most of the people going through it, not a small minority. What they do not show is why. That is what our interviews were for.

72% say the job search has harmed their mental health (Resume Genius, 1,000 US job seekers, August 2024), and 55% of recently unemployed adults describe themselves as completely burned out (Insight Global, 501 US adults, July 2023).

Three Focus Points for Investigation

The surveys showed the damage but not its causes, so we built the interview guide around three questions a survey cannot answer.

The Tools Organise the Work. None of Them Question It.

We interviewed five job seekers mid-search, applying to anywhere from four roles a week to thirty, then audited the two tools they kept mentioning. Teal and Simplify both autofill forms, track statuses and help you apply to more jobs. Not one of our interviewees said that applying to more jobs was their problem.

What the Interviews Kept Saying

We sorted every interview quote into an affinity map. The clusters that came out were all about emotional fatigue, not about a missing feature.

The three insights a product could answer. The fourth cluster, silence from employers, is outside any product's control: no feature makes a company reply.

This question shaped everything that follows.

Growth Was the Only Honest Promise

Every competitor's brand promises the outcome: the job. That is the one thing no product controls. What we could promise honestly is growth, because skills and habits build long before anyone says yes. So the brand is designed to calm you down, not to keep you hooked.

Calm Is the Feature, Not the Decoration

A face is the quickest way to give a mascot personality. But a mouth is also what makes a face look like it is judging you. People mid-search are already anxious about being assessed, and Jobi reads their CVs, cover letters and interview answers all day. So the mascot has no mouth in any pose: it cannot frown, smirk or look disappointed. Everything it expresses comes through its eyes and its posture, and nothing it does reads as a verdict.

One Companion, End to End

Jobi runs as a browser side-panel next to the job search. You choose which roles to go for; Jobi handles everything around them: the research, the documents, the tracking and the practice. Each of the three insights has a feature behind it. One more thing the interviews asked for, autofill, was built and then removed; the reason is further down.

The Chat: Judgement on Tap

Answers the third insight: the research you have to do before you can write a word.

The home screen is a chat. Paste a job posting and Jobi tells you whether it is worth applying for, tailors your CV and cover letter, and researches the company, so you stop juggling tabs.

Interview Practice

Answers the silence from employers: when replies are rare, the few interviews you get have to count.

The Tracker

Answers the first insight: statuses logged by hand go stale.

Momentum

Answers the second insight: a rejection can stop the search for a week.

Three things in the tracker are there to get you going again. Reminders bring a role back before it goes quiet. Rejections move to Closed, so the pipeline you look at every day is the live one. And the streak counts the days you showed up: it never warns you that you are about to lose it, and after a rejection it goes quiet instead of loud.

Design, Build, and Lead in One Loop

The three of us ran research, ideation and design together in Figma. The build I took on alone: every screen went into Claude Code and came out as working software.

I am a designer, not an engineer, so the build had to be set up as a system before any of it was written. Two things carried it.

Whenever two options were both reasonable, the decision went back to a research finding rather than to taste, and was written down with what it cost. Those notes are the trade-off boxes in this study. They are also what let a designer build something solid enough to carry an MVP.

Key Takeaway

A shape-shifting canvas for real-world moments

Imagine heading out for the evening. Instead of hunting through cluttered app drawers for ride-shares and reservations, the OS does the heavy lifting. It instantly generates a distraction-free, temporary environment containing only the relevant tools, keeping you focused on the physical world.

Mapping the Journey

Holding the essential button from the lock screen opens the configuration menu alongside a sweeping light animation. After selecting “Date Night,” the system drops the user into their curated home screen and updates the hardware to display an “Auto-Expire” progress bar. A persistent yellow status pill remains at the top right, letting users effortlessly tweak settings or exit the context to restore the standard OS.

Intentional usage through a unified ecosystem

Nothing’s philosophy centers on intentional smartphone usage: less time navigating apps, more time living in the moment. Essential Context realizes this vision by acting as the central intelligence hub for the entire Nothing ecosystem. By synchronizing with other Essential features, it reduces cognitive load and transforms raw data into a highly focused environment.

As illustrated in the Date Night example below, each Essential feature works together to silently curate your experience:

By unifying these tools, the OS evolves from a passive grid of icons into a shape-shifting, predictive canvas. Ultimately, the more Essential features you use, the more deeply personalized your environment becomes, allowing you to remain fully present in the physical world.

Synchronizing the system

To truly embed this feature into the Nothing ecosystem, the hardware and software must act as a single, synchronized mechanism:

Minimising clicks, maximizing presence

To ensure the interface felt as frictionless as the concept itself, I focused on two core design choices:

Where the OS goes next

While the current concept relies on manual triggers, the long-term vision makes the OS entirely proactive: