Designing for an era of collaboration, creative expression, and intelligent documents

What if your PDFs could help you collaborate and get your work done? That’s the idea behind Adobe Acrobat Studio, Document Cloud’s new AI-powered hub for PDF Spaces, Adobe Express, and AI Assistant.

It’s the Acrobat people know and trust, with a serious upgrade. Whether someone is customizing an AI Assistant to guide responses, collecting files and links in personalized PDF Spaces, or jumpstarting presentations with AI-generated visuals in Express, Acrobat Studio brings it all together in a smart, streamlined space.

We sat down with Acrobat’s design team to explore the user-centered strategy behind the transformation that’s redefining what people can do with PDFs.

What was the primary goal when you set out to design Acrobat Studio?

Stephanie Mencarelli (VP of Design, Document Cloud): Everything we’re doing in Document Cloud right now is about ushering Adobe Acrobat and PDFs into their next era. Our design goal was to enhance a beloved product without disrupting workflows that are critical to people all over the world. And, while it might have been tempting to treat the desktop as the future of Acrobat, we know that usability must extend across platforms. We want people to experience all of Acrobat’s capabilities—whether they’re using it on desktop, mobile, web, or through Chrome and Edge browser extensions.

At the heart of our design strategy was a single, overarching question: “How do you introduce a new Acrobat to the world?” We knew the answer wouldn’t come overnight. It would require thoughtful evolution that respects what people already love while opening the door to what’s possible.

What user insights did you leverage to help inform the design solution?

Bill Long (Director, Research & Strategy): Acrobat’s evolution is being shaped by real feedback from people who use it—like students pulling together information from their readings, or business professionals seeking faster ways to analyze multiple complex documents. Take Alfonso, for example: As a PhD student, EdTech administrator, and podcaster, he uses Acrobat Studio to gather insights for his dissertation, create leadership briefings with built-in citations, and generate guest questions from different sources. It saves him hours of work and demonstrates how Acrobat Studio can flex to fit the needs of students, business professionals, and creatives alike.

In addition, for many Acrobat users, this is their first experience with generative AI. Roughly 60% of our customers have never used AI chatbots or large language models (LLMs) before. If Acrobat is their introduction to this technology, we wanted it to bring real value to their everyday tasks—whether it was helping a student understand a large body of journal articles or helping a business professional understand the market conditions of their customers. Our focus had to be on simplifying workflows and making sure the insights Acrobat generated were always tied back to the user’s own documents, with clickable sources so people would know exactly where the information came from. We knew that focus would not only boost productivity but would foster trust for academic and professional workflows.

Roughly 60% of our customers have never used AI chatbots or large language models (LLMs) before. If Acrobat is their introduction to this technology, we wanted it to bring real value to their everyday tasks.

Bill Long, Director, Research & Strategy

Finally, to ensure user-centered perspectives are embedded at every stage of development, from alpha to launch, we designed a quality evaluation rubric based on user-perceived quality across five key categories:

• Experience quality focuses on how intuitive and satisfying it is to use Acrobat Studio. It addresses questions about the ease or difficulty of using features, as well as which ones work well, and which don’t.
• AI output quality determines whether users find Acrobat’s answers to be accurate, complete, and clearly linked to their sources. We focus on whether the results are helpful and relevant to users, then combine those findings with technical evaluation results.
• Customer value looks at whether Acrobat helps people more quickly accomplish their goals—and at a high quality. We use open-ended feedback to understand the different types of value users experience.
• Responsibility encompasses harm and bias, transparency, and user control. It helps ensure that the product is free from offensive or stereotypical content, provides clarity about the origins of generated answers, and gives users a sense of control over their experience.
• Performance measures speed and reliability—how quickly Acrobat loads, how fast it responds, and how well it handles errors.

These categories help us keep the focus on what users actually experience. We use them in research sessions, testing events, and team reviews to bring together user feedback into one consolidated view. It ensures Acrobat Studio isn’t just working well, but that it’s enjoyable, valuable, and truly centered on the people who use it.

What was the most unique aspect of the design process?

Jennifer Balanky (Senior Content Strategy Manager, Document Cloud): As we set out to design Acrobat Studio, it quickly became clear that UX content strategists had a unique role to play beyond designing the voice of the interface.

In the case of PDF Spaces, the interface is language. If the generative AI outputs missed the mark in terms of quality or tone of voice, content strategists partnered closely with AI/ML engineers and architects to fine-tune the backend prompts that delivered them. We used our strengths as language strategists to ensure generated content was useful, usable, and modern—the tenets of Adobe’s quality framework.

Carolina Paula (Senior Design Manager, PDF Spaces) and Mili Sharma (Group Design Manager, Acrobat Studio Home): Acrobat Studio was a design-led project. But the lines between the responsibilities of the design team and the product team blurred as we worked together to define and refine the vision of quality we had for our product. That push for quality created a sense of ownership in the experience and an appetite across every role to create the best possible product.

Stephanie Mencarelli: I agree that a big part of this story is how open this design process has been. Co-creating across disciplines—from AI research and engineering to product and content strategy—helped us refine the quality of the LLM output and shape an experience that feels conversational and intuitive.

Designers used generative AI prototyping tools to share ideas quickly, and Adobe Firefly Boards to illustrate a day in the life of a user. Engineers built early proofs of concept and prototypes to explore how the experience might feel in practice. These fast, iterative, and deeply collaborative ways of working are becoming more common, and they have helped us move quickly without losing sight of the user. That’s not to say we had it all figured out, but the close collaboration gave us the freedom to experiment and learn as we went.

What was the biggest hurdle in designing Acrobat Studio?

Mei Av (Director of Design, PDF Spaces): Even though we’d designed a proof of concept within a month, since we were rearchitecting and building something completely new in Acrobat, it required months of rapid iteration and design. The pace of those months, and our close partnership with engineering, changed the way we worked.

Liza Ruzer (Senior Manager, Design Operations, Acrobat) and Mili Sharma: The design process was highly cross-functional, involving collaboration across multiple business units, platforms, geographies, and functions. This made it a matrixed effort that extended beyond typical team boundaries, often requiring us to build and define the project simultaneously. As scope expanded and new requirements and dependencies surfaced, we had to ruthlessly prioritize to stay focused on delivering a minimum lovable design.

Jennifer Balanky: As PDF Spaces evolved, our content strategists prioritized framing the experience in a way that built trust, comprehension, and clarity for Acrobat users unfamiliar with generative AI workflows. To guide our language decisions, we collaborated with research partners to understand how users described their interactions then incorporated that direct feedback. In parallel, we worked closely with product marketing to ensure consistent messaging across the product interface and all external communications.

How did the solutions improve the in-product experience?

Stephanie Mencarelli: Our hyper focus on creating real value for real use cases helped us fine-tune those that were most compelling. For instance, opening a PDF file and editing a few words here and there is easy because it’s a workflow that’s familiar. But what about those you need to go edit or create at a new level? That’s when the design helps graduate users to form a new relationship with Acrobat.

Acrobat Studio Home

Acrobat Studio Home is a landing page that introduces the user experience through three cards: Add files and links to a PDF Space, Create with Adobe Express, and Edit your PDF.

Stephanie Mencarelli and Mili Sharma: We’d always referred to Acrobat users as “knowledge workers,” but when we began calling them “business pros,” we uncovered workflows that extended beyond reading and editing PDFs. Those insights helped us create Home, a unified space that brings all the functionality of Acrobat Studio together in one space. Users can find tools based on intent in an interface that feels familiar to other products in Adobe’s ecosystem. But, with hundreds of millions of people globally using our application every month, we still couldn’t design for every single use.

The AI-first interaction of the Home screen—where data information systems provide just the right context to onboard and nudge people in just the right way—was our response to the needs of those many users. We considered it the first fold of our experience, where we ensure we cater to different intents and let users know they can choose their lane and go from there.

PDF Spaces

PDF Spaces is Acrobat Studio‘s knowledge hub for Office 365 files, PDFs, and web links.

Mei Av and Carolina Paula: Our vision, when we brought the AI Assistant into Acrobat last year, was to build AI more deeply into the Acrobat experience. PDF Spaces is the beginning of that journey. One of its most powerful and differentiating aspects is its ability to generate AI insights grounded in the user’s own documents.

We learned that people don’t really think in goal-oriented ways. They come in with tasks and their goals form from those tasks. As an example, people might open the app with the task of extracting information or insights from a document, but their goal is writing a summary report to share or developing a unique point of view on a topic. Helping people drive to something bigger wasn’t always easy from a design standpoint but much of the design work in PDF Spaces helps people better understand those larger goals. It’s the start of evolving Acrobat from a task-based transactional tool to a more outcome-based application with more end-to-end workflows.

AI Assistant

AI Assistant’s auto-generated insights cards, summary panels, and intelligent citations offer an alternative to prompting.

Mei Av: One of the things we learned after releasing AI Assistant is that prompting can be a barrier for people new to AI. Since they’re unsure about the capabilities of the technology, they don’t always know how or what to prompt. We focused on solving that cold-start, empty-prompt-box problem.

We knew that the most common pre-canned prompt people chose was, "Show me 5 key takeaways," so we thought, "Why not just automatically do that for them?” We auto-generate insights cards and summary panels so people can copy the summary and move on or use the cards as a jumping-off point. The experience also surfaces examples of questions and prompts they can ask. In research sessions, participants shared that without any prompting, they could immediately understand the content of the files they brought in.

Adobe Express

The capabilities of Adobe Express are vast, so the features and functions were chosen that would make the most sense for Acrobat’s users.

Mili Sharma: Express is huge, so we hand-picked functionality that made sense for different users with different use cases. Because not every use case would bring someone back to Acrobat, by hand-picking them, we always had a good idea of where people would end up. We defined three Express integration levels:

• First level experiences are fully integrated and will happen within Acrobat
• Second level experiences take people to Express for detail work, but then return them to Acrobat
• Third level experiences require that people stay in Express

By showing what fits for each tier, and the experiences people would have, the whole journey could make sense for them. Hand-picking those and hand-picking the template categories for each use case helped ensure that users will engage with them rather than think it’s not for them.

What did you learn from this design process?

Stephanie Mencarelli: Building products that are easy to use and quickly provide value is hard. We do the research so we have a good idea of what will work and what won’t, but when so many people are using an application powered by an infinite-possibility LLM, you can’t design for every single person or every single use case. A design team must have an opinion about how the product will be used.

And that’s what made me very proud: We’re opinionated when we need to be. By balancing a collaborative nature with being ultra opinionated about why we were making certain design decisions (and holding true to them), it not only helped us make decisions quickly, but it also helped us hold a bar for quality.

Carolina Paula: When you first start working on projects, you go into them with some ambiguity. Things get interesting once the application is in our audience’s hands, researchers start getting feedback, and we can work with real user data and information. That’s when we were able to start asking ourselves whether we were solving the right problems, if our hypotheses were correct, and what adjustments we needed to make. And that’s the beauty of building and working as a cross-functional team. We’re able to quickly integrate our insights and adjust, and that’s really rewarding.

When so many people are using an application powered by an infinite-possibility LLM, you can’t design for every single person or every single use case. A design team must have an opinion about how the product will be used.

Stephanie Mencarelli, VP of Design, Document Cloud

Liza Ruzer and Mili Sharma: It’s nearly impossible for a design team to know all flows and surfaces in such a large, integrated experience. The tight timeline fostered collaboration, quick decision-making, and reduced unnecessary blocking. And because we were adapting and learning as we progressed, the strong relationships we had with the product team were crucial for unlocking the experience, managing rapid changes, and balancing quality and speed.

What’s next for Acrobat Studio?

Stephanie Mencarelli: This is just the beginning of our journey to define the future of documents and collaboration. Acrobat Studio is becoming more than a workspace; it’s a place where ideas take shape, whether someone is sketching out a thesis, quickly understanding business documents, or simply organizing their day. With tools like AI Assistant (with pre-packaged and customizable agents), PDF Spaces, and Adobe Express, it’s helping people work with more clarity and create with more heart. And considering the number of people in the world who use Acrobat, this isn’t just about productivity, it’s about possibility—for everyone.

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