Case Study:
KeynotePro
KeynotePro v4.0
A 20th Anniversary Reboot of keynotepro.com to set the stage for an entirely new era.
At a Glance
KeynotePro remains the single longest-running thru-line of my working life, having played an evolving role from that early, experimental launch in 2003 straight through to the established, steady-state pace of operation it had taken on through 2020. With the 20th Anniversary on the horizon, I went back to those experimental roots to begin to re-imagine the total-journey experience of using a KeynotePro Theme System and to identify ways the site could better reflect the standards and quality of the products themselves.
With decades of feedback, analytics, and operational metrics in hand, I redesigned every segment of the journey around a streamlined discovery-to-installation experience, evolving the entire stack underneath to build a more modernized, fully-custom application core that's finely tuned to our catalog and the myriad ways our customers make use of it.
Any Device, Day or Night
The KeynotePro v4 platform is built to Progressive Web App (PWA) standards, making it easy to add to your homescreen in MacOS, iOS, or elsewhere. The entire framework is deeply responsive, including full light/dark support extending down into the UI state of the screen mockups themselves.
Personalized & Streamlined
In the v3 architecture, popular options like Upgrade Pricing and Multi-Item Discounts required direct customer action or siloed selection pathways. Now, v4's centralized API adjusts to reflect Upgrade eligibility at every relevant touch-point automatically, and multi-item Bundles self-assemble as eligible items are added to the Bag.
Expanded Access, Better Utility
In the v4 framework, the entire File Access pipeline is expanded to offer full file-level parity for desktop and iOS clients, with a global Pending Downloads feed offering shortcuts to the latest Files and Updates. A new Up-to-Date DMG option for Mac packs all the latest files for a theme system into one convenient download.
With One More Thing...
This total-journey approach laid the foundation for extending the entire Library – and Keynote itself – in completely different ways. An all-new service layer – Composer – transforms Plain Text descriptions of Objects, Slides, or entire Presentations into AppleScript routines that automate their production in Keynote for MacOS.
