Hero image — A polished full-width screenshot of the new Gainsight community landing page after migration. Show the homepage of one of the 106 communities at its best. 2400×1350px.
Overview
106 communities. One chance to get it right.
Adobe operates 106 App Communities — support forums where customers get help, report bugs, and request features across Adobe's product portfolio. For years these communities lived on Khoros, a third-party platform that had grown increasingly limiting. The decision was made to migrate to Gainsight, a more modern platform better suited to the experience Adobe wanted to deliver.
I was the design lead for the entire migration — responsible for the vision, the research, the design system, and the implementation partnership with Gainsight's engineering team.
The problem
A platform that had stopped serving users
The existing communities weren't working well for customers or for Adobe. The platform felt dated and offered little flexibility to shape the experience around user needs or brand standards. Key features were missing — there was no structured way to report a bug or request a feature, which meant customer feedback was getting lost in open-ended discussion threads.
The goal wasn't just to move — it was to arrive somewhere meaningfully better. This was a rare opportunity to rethink the entire experience from the ground up, unconstrained by the old platform's limitations.
Before — Khoros — Screenshot of the old community experience on Khoros. Can be a cropped homepage or thread view showing the dated UI. 1200×900px.
Before — the Khoros platform.
After — Gainsight — Screenshot of the new community experience post-migration. Same type of view (homepage or thread) for a direct comparison. 1200×900px.
After — the redesigned Gainsight experience.
Process
Four phases across nine months
The migration unfolded in four distinct phases, each building on the last. The key discipline throughout was separating the vision from the constraints — knowing what we were aiming for before letting platform limitations shape what we'd build.
Vision — platform agnostic
Before any vendor was chosen, I developed platform-agnostic vision designs representing what a best-in-class support community could look like for Adobe customers. This work was deliberately unconstrained — it gave the team a north star grounded in user needs and design ambition rather than whatever any given platform happened to offer out of the box.
Research & competitive audit
I conducted an extensive audit of support communities across the tech industry, identifying patterns in information architecture, content strategy, navigation, and community engagement mechanics. The goal was to understand established conventions worth adopting — and gaps worth owning.
Adaptation & tradeoff negotiation
Once Gainsight was selected, I led a thorough evaluation of what the platform offered out of the box versus what our vision required. Working closely with Gainsight's program managers, product managers, and engineers, I mapped our vision against their platform capabilities and made principled decisions about where to push their system and where to accept constraints.
Design, handoff & quality assurance
I created full-page designs and a complete design system for Gainsight's team to implement. I then worked directly with their front-end engineers through implementation, maintaining close involvement to ensure design fidelity and conducting extensive quality reviews at every stage.
Vision design — One of your early platform-agnostic explorations showing the design ambition before vendor selection. A Figma frame or high-fidelity mockup works well here. 2400×1350px.
Early vision design — platform agnostic, setting the north star before vendor selection.
Design system
Building for 106 communities at once
One of the central design challenges was scale. Any design decision I made would need to apply consistently across 106 different communities, each serving a different Adobe product and its distinct user base. This meant thinking in systems, not screens — every component, pattern, and decision needed to be reusable, flexible, and well-documented for the Gainsight engineering team to implement.
Design system — A view of the component library or design system you created for Gainsight to implement. Could be a Figma screenshot showing components, tokens, or a key page layout. 2400×1350px.
The design system built for Gainsight's engineering team — covering components, typography, colour, and layout patterns.
Bug reporting flow — The new structured bug reporting feature, one of the key additions post-migration. A screen or flow from Figma. 1200×900px.
New structured bug reporting — giving customers a clear path to surface issues.
Feature request flow — The new feature request experience, another key new addition. A screen or flow from Figma. 1200×900px.
New feature requesting — closing the feedback loop between customers and product teams.
Outcome
All 106 communities, successfully migrated
The migration was completed on schedule across all 106 communities. The new platform introduced structured bug reporting and feature requesting — giving customers clearer, more actionable ways to get help and make their voices heard. The new experience brought Adobe's community presence in line with where the product and brand had evolved, built on a foundation designed to scale.
Closing image — A wide, polished view of the final community experience. Could be a full browser screenshot or a composed mockup showing the community homepage in context. 2400×1030px (21:9).