A new collaborative design tool makes life easier for non-designers

The Kabob team

In many small businesses around the world, owners often serve as the designer/programmer/marketer and management for their operation and the time they have to devote to each area is often divided and in short supply. Where once, with brick and mortar operations there was not so much of a need for professional assistance to help with design work, the internet era is vastly different. The difference between a poorly designed website/social media platform/e-store and a better designed competitor often means the difference between attracting customers and retaining users or fading into irrelevance. Out of the confusion and messiness, many startups are competing from different angles to streamline the design process, offering both cost-savings and greater efficiency.

One such startup is Kabob. It’s a service that has its beginnings in CEO Steve Tsai’s earlier life, in the two prior startups before his present endeavor. Tsai’s previous involvement in his ecommerce and social marketing consultancies exposed him to a number of smaller outfits who were spending an inordinate amount of time on what he considered to be less productive design work, with very little net benefit.

So Tsai and a newly assembled team built a product designed to take some of the design burden out of the hands of time-starved business owners. Basically it’s like a mix of Canva and Google Documents – with a little bit of 99Designs thrown in – for people to make marketing and promo graphics with ease.

Small biz focus

Tsai gives an example of the workflow:

Say I’m a good business developer, I can try to get a lot of friends to get a lot of products onto my website, basically day-by-day. The different brands will give me different content, raw graphic files, and these files will then need to be edited and redesigned for different marketing campaigns and different ecommerce displays. We’ll need to have our designer do a lot of small jobs like this, even though these jobs don’t provide a lot of net benefit. Our product can reduce this work, increase efficiency.

Tsai stresses that many smaller outfits do not have the marketing budgets to make their offerings appealing to buyers – especially lean businesses that may not even have an in-house designer or perhaps they have only a single designer who oversees the company’s broader design strategy. This is where Kabob steps in.

Similar to how Google catalogs user search queries and learns from the behavior of its users, Kabob pools the preferences of its users into an advanced computer algorithm designed to intelligently suggest and auto configure a design outline. Designs are formulated on the basis of user-inputted color preferences, layout, and target audience.

For many business owners who have some general idea about the concept of their brand, this feature, when combined with rudimentary mock-ups and some design concepts, increases the speed of completion and improves the overall quality of their projects.

“We help when we know their preference, when we know their behavior. It’s kind of like auto-generate with the assistance of machine learning,” Tsai explains.

Collaborative

In addition to the inbuilt intelligence of the system, there is a social element to the platform that allows for collaborative works. that allows for collaborative works. Much like how Google Documents functions, enabling multiple people to participate in a single project simultaneously, Kabob also offers a similar feature where multiple members of a team or perhaps a business owner and an off-site designer can collaborate on a project. Including a facility like this adds to the stickiness of the platform – a free added bonus to encourage user loyalty and returns.