The interface had grown complex for people new to font management and/or new to the product. Having used FontExplorer X since its beta days, even I was a bit lost when loading up the latest version.

• Many of the features favored by experienced users were turned off by default.
• Organizing a fonts is seen as critical for a Designer’s workflow, but the experience was tedious.
• Important and related settings were tucked into disconnected sections of the UI.
• Discovery of fonts in the library was mostly reliant on user memory, scrolling through long lists, or tedious manual categorization.

We needed to ease the learning curve: Complexity should be clarified, default preferences should set users up for immediate success, and tedious tasks should be automated.

Guiding principles for the future releases:

• Update Discovery features to allow Designers to find great type in their own library.
• Key font management activities should be automated as much as possible.
• The most powerful features should be turned on by default in the first install.
• Adopt a “Clean-as-you-go” habit: UI elements should be clarified as the underlying features are updated.

Working with our internal Research and Development team, we were able to leverage a proprietary machine learning engine to add powerful automation and discovery features. We named this innovation the “Discovery Engine”.

• The new “Discovery Engine” was able to categorize any font in a user’s library and organize their fonts automatically.
• The “Discovery Engine” also analyzed the style of each font, allowing users to easily find similar fonts, or fonts that paired well together.
• Features like automatic font activation and font previews in the library were turned on by default.
• Relevant integrations with other design software on the user’s device were highlighted during setup.
• Related settings were grouped together and moved to the preference panel.