One key to run all of Vitra Universe.
Vitra Universe is one product with many rooms. The command menu turned all of them into a single search. Press one key and the whole thing is one action away.
One product wearing many rooms.
Vitra Universe is one big product. Everything else, Translate.video, Translate.photo, Translate.website, Short.video and Personalize, lives inside it as a module. That looks clean on a diagram. In daily use it meant the product had a lot of rooms, and you had to walk through most of them to get anything done.
It was never about finding features.
The product already had everything. Dub, subtitle, translate, resize, localize, personalize. Nothing was missing. The features were just scattered across modules, and the only way to reach one was to remember which room it lived in.
Say you wanted to translate a video. You opened the products module, found Translate.video, chose video translation, then started. Three or four steps before the real work began. Do that twenty times a day and the walking costs more than the work. For a power user moving between modules all day, it was friction you stop noticing and just absorb.
So the menu was never about navigation alone. It was about closing the distance between wanting to do something and doing it.
Press one key, see the whole product.
You press Command K and the menu opens over whatever you are on. Search sits at the top. Below it the product is laid out in plain sections, so you can scan instead of type if you prefer.
Picks up where you left off, like resuming a dub that is 70 percent done.
Starts the common things: a project, a client, a task, a proposal, an invoice.
Image, Video, Website and Personalize, each holding its real actions.
Moves you around the app, with shortcuts for the places you reach for most.
Brings back what you touched last, so you never go hunting for it.
Every row is keyboard first. Navigate, open, run an action, all without the mouse. The footer keeps the controls in view so you never have to guess.
Create. The everyday starting points, each with a shortcut.
Video. Translate.video actions surfaced without opening the module.
Website. Paste a link to localize it, right from the menu.
Go to. Wayfinding and recent work in one place.
The menu reads the file before you do.
Drop a file into the menu, or paste a link, and it detects the format and shows only what makes sense for that input. You stop choosing a product. You hand the system a file and it tells you what you can do with it.
Drop a PNG. Detected as Translate.photo. Translate the image, resize it, pull and translate the text inside it, or turn it into a video.
Image is the one I am showing here, but it is only one input. The same engine reads the rest, and sends each one to its own module with the right actions already open.
Translate.video. Dub, subtitle, lipsync, transcript, or cut it down to shorts.
Document translation, formatting kept intact, with a jump to video as the next step.
Translate.website. Paste any public URL and localize the whole page.
Personalize. A list of names becomes the path to personalized video at scale.
The point is the same in every case, so I only need to show it once. The file decides the actions, not the user.
That small inversion is the whole idea. The product comes to the work, instead of the work going to find the product.
Built on Aero.
The menu sits on Aero, the design system I built for Vitra. That mattered here. A command menu touches every module, so it had to feel native everywhere at once. Aero carried the spacing, the type, the restraint and the single deliberate use of purple straight through. Nothing felt bolted on.
I checked it was worth building before I drew a thing.
I was already a heavy command menu user myself, mostly Raycast, so I knew how good the pattern feels when it is done right. Vitra Universe was vast and genuinely hard to use, which made it the right candidate.
I did not want to spend 1-2 days on something nobody needed. So before designing anything, I sat with my co-founder and a few internal users to test whether this was worth building. It was. The same problems kept surfacing, and the menu kept being the answer. After that I worked the structure through with AI to sharpen the thinking, generated a few quick directions in Claude Design to feel them out, then built the real thing in Figma.
Still in development, but the reaction was clear.
It is still being built, so I have no hard numbers, and I would rather not invent any.
What I have is the prototype testing. When internal users opened the menu and saw how much they could do without leaving the page, the reaction was the same almost every time. Mild disbelief. People who had been walking through all those rooms for months suddenly had one door. That is the outcome I trust most right now. The numbers will come.
The full menu, top to bottom. One door to the whole product.
THE TAKE AWAY
A good command menu does not add features. It removes the distance to the ones you already have.
Reach out and get in touch
Contact me and let’s create magic
with design. amithcmyk@gmail.com
OR find me here
