How the Crystal Ball Asset Platform Boosted Design Efficiency: A 2020 Upgrade Journey

Background

Crystal Ball Asset Sharing Center is a one‑stop IP asset management platform driven by UXD designers, aggregating massive high‑quality design resources to improve team design efficiency, standardize processes, and support rapid business development.

Since its launch on July 25, 2019, version 1.0 was completed; in 2020 the team upgraded to version 2.0, addressing several problems and achieving rapid growth.

Problem Identification

Poor quality: Inconsistent material quality and lack of control standards.

Low participation: Upload quota is mandatory but designers lack motivation and transparent evaluation.

Usability issues: Low usage frequency, unsatisfactory search results, and various bugs.

Goal Clarification

The key is to increase the value of the gallery by improving material quality and quantity, which drives upload/download activity. The aim is to raise quarterly upload, download, and usage‑rate metrics by 20%.

Goal Decomposition & Execution

Quarterly core actions: Q2 – refine business scenarios and allocate gallery resources; Q3 – integrate premium galleries and launch a points system; Q4 – close the functional loop and open the platform company‑wide. OKRs are defined for each quarter.

Updates are released roughly every month, with each version containing new tasks and legacy issue fixes. Planning the next version while the current one is about to launch ensures orderly iteration.

Three pillars of improvement: (1) strengthen basic performance and experience, (2) expand material volume, (3) build premium custom galleries.

Key Initiatives

Basic experience: User feedback pool, 15% of each version’s tasks come from user suggestions.

Search usability: Unified numbering, ID, uploader, and keyword suggestions for precise retrieval.

Similar‑image recommendation: Shows related images on detail pages.

Material types expansion: Added 3D models (C4D, OBJ, FBX, ZPRJ) covering gifts, characters, cars, scenes.

Source diversification: Photo collection contest yielded 1 620 images, 35% usable, saving ~10 k CNY and 187 h of design time.

Points system: Rewards uploads, downloads, and usage; ties individual and team scores to rankings and prizes, dramatically increasing participation.

Premium galleries: Integrated external libraries (Visual China, TuChong) for seamless in‑platform search.

Custom business galleries: Tailored collections for different business lines with upload standards.

Smart platform integration: Connected with Zebra design AI platform for automatic parsing and recombination of design assets.

Data Outcomes

Material count exceeds 26 000, with a monthly addition of ~3 000 (↑74.96% QoQ). Download volume grew 2.24×, usage rate stabilized around 43%, a high industry level.

Takeaways

Project management insights: resource integration, timeline control, and goal alignment are crucial. Transitioning from designer to product mindset requires a holistic view, prioritization, and understanding of underlying technical logic.

Next steps: Open Crystal Ball internally to all teams; contact for collaboration.