Overview

CORE by 5th Kind is a Digital Asset Management (DAM) software that helps production studios manage their complex workflows — to view, share, and approve assets securely across their teams.

I worked cross-functionally to execute our Usability Initiative by identifying and prioritizing features that our key clients were impacted most by. Through this project, we focused on enhancing the desktop Video Playback feature of our product, which gave us a huge opportunity to evaluate its complexity.

Problem

Our key clients complained about the overall usability and the steep learning curve of CORE Desktop. The team lacked a proper strategy to formally include Usability as part of our product roadmap.

Objectives

• Implement a formal UX framework to investigate and re-prioritize usability issues
• Develop local components to address use cases within Video Player feature

The Process

Uncover & Evaluate

• Heuristic Evaluation
• Opportunity Workshop

Strategize

• Use Case Matrix
• User Flow

Design & Implement

• Med-fi Wireframes
• Prototype

Tackling our Priority Feature

Heuristic Evaluation | Opportunity Workshop

My first observation coming into this project was the massive backlog of 60+ usability issues. The problem was how they were inadequately addressed, due to:

1. Lack of proper specs or metrics that lead to subjective prioritization
2. No user or business impact
3. Short-sighted product solutions

While the listed Jira issues were far from complete, I leveraged this to better understand the reported usability issues. To create better documentation, I organized these issues into specific themes, which helped inform my approach conducting a heuristic evaluation.

Heuristic Evaluation of CORE Desktop

Most reported issues pointed to the Video Playback Experience of our product, and in evaluating this feature, I noted that the severity of these issues were “more critical.” To better measure the severity, I referred to the Severity and Scale of Impact metrics (NN/g severity ratings).

I measured the severity of the issue (How critical is the usability?) and scale of impact (How many users does this reach?).

This became a living and breathing Usability Audit that uncovered patterns across our usability issues, which helped me establish larger Epics and Themes. I worked closely with the COO, VP of Client Services, and PM to build consensus around the Themes and Epics priorities.

The COO then used these metrics to help implement the design-to-development process. By using severity ratings and user feedback, our Product Team was able to communicate the impact to internal stakeholders, helping us launch our first large-scale usability program.

Opportunity Workshop with our Team

With an internally approved Usability Audit, I set up an opportunity workshop to have Client and Product teams in the same room.

The goal of the 2-hour workshop was to use this sheet as a living source to set initiatives.

By aggressively fleshing out all Themes and Epics in the spreadsheet, our team came to a decision to prioritize improving the Video Playback experience, which offered the biggest area of design opportunity.

Strategize

Jira Epics | Use Case Matrix

Writing Jira Epics and Stories

Our strategy phase consisted of delegating and working asynchronously. Weekly meetings with our offshore developers turned out to be difficult, so the best method was writing structured user stories. Because the PM was occupied with an urgent project, I took on writing them and reviewed with the team to get aligned on product priorities.

With the Usability Audit and synced up priorities, our team was finally able to target a deadline of 3 months.

Use Case Matrix: Addressing Responsiveness

After my meeting with the visual designer, I decided to create a Use Case Matrix to better visualize the use cases, since our overall goal was to ensure a consistent UI across iPad, iOS, and Desktop.

I defined the axes by file type and device type. The horizontal axis consisted of the major file types (video, image, pdf) and the vertical axis the device and orientation (desktop, iPad, iOS).

Luckily, we were working on the Mobile UI (see case study) in tandem, so I was able to pull in new visual references.

Design

Med-fi wireframes | Prototyping

As our team moved forward to the Design phase, I collaborated with our contract Visual Designer to expand our new global Design System that we built from our Mobile Project, to address Desktop elements. Then I led bi-weekly design critiques to get our internal stakeholders aligned on our UI designs.

Building out a Design System 🎨

While I worked with the PM on the mobile strategy, I delegated our contract designer to own the component library, since he had been tasked to polish UI designs.

I provided specs into specific states and variations of these global components, as well as for different devices and use cases.