Workflow Tool Design at Kovalee
The best solutions sometimes come from the most unexpected places. During a coffee break, I overheard our creative team venting about their UGC review process: creators were waiting weeks for feedback, revisions were getting lost in email chains, and our team was drowning in manual coordination. What started as casual frustration became my next project.
Our UGC creators were stuck in a feedback loop that felt more like feedback purgatory. The creative team was manually reviewing content, sending feedback via email, then losing track of revisions and approvals. Creators had no visibility into where their content stood, and our team was spending more time on logistics than actual creative direction.
The existing process looked like this: Creator submits content via email, creative team reviews manually, feedback sent back via email, creator revises, repeat until someone remembers to approve it.
This wasn't a scheduled roadmap item, but the pain was real and immediate. I pitched the idea at our next standup: what if we built a streamlined feedback tool that creators could actually use?
I had one day to prove the concept was worth pursuing.
Research through observation
Instead of formal interviews, I shadowed our creative team for half a day. I watched them juggle browser tabs, hunt through Slack threads, and manually update spreadsheets to track content status. The biggest bottleneck wasn't the feedback itself—it was the coordination around it.
Rapid prototyping with v0
I jumped straight into v0 and built a working prototype in a few hours. No wireframes, no lengthy specs, just a functional flow that let our creative team organize feedback by content type, leave clear structured comments, and track everything in real-time.
The prototype was rough (v0's placeholder images were interesting), but it worked. You could categorize feedback, add detailed comments, and see the entire feedback thread in one place with clear status tracking.
I demoed the prototype at our next standup. The creative team's reaction was immediate: "When can we use this?"
The working prototype that changed everything
We spent the rest of the day iterating. The developers jumped in, Francis helped clean up the code structure, and the creative team tested it with real content. By end of day, we had a tool that actually solved their problem.
Key improvements from feedback:
The tool transformed how our creative team worked with UGC creators. Review cycles that used to take weeks now happened in a few days. More importantly, it brought certainty to both sides: creators got clearer, more actionable feedback through structured communication, and our team could track everything without losing requests in email threads.
The biggest win was eliminating the constant back-and-forth of "did you see my feedback?" and "what's the status on this?" Both creators and our team finally had visibility into the entire process.
More importantly, it opened the door to ongoing collaboration between design and engineering. This was my first real code contribution at Kovalee, and it showed the team that designers could ship functional solutions, not just hand off mockups.
The project also reinforced something I'd learned at Kovalee: the best features often come from paying attention to the small frustrations. Sometimes the biggest impact comes from solving problems that aren't on any roadmap.