Trigger One is a Media Asset Management system that allows organizations and teams to come together and collaborate on media files. This includes large production and distribution houses like Sony, Disney, and Viacom, and also smaller teams in agencies or startups.
Goal
We wanted to bring the Trigger One experience to mobile devices. We listened to our customers and wanted to help them collaborate on their media assets while on the go.
My role
I led the design team at Tessact, and my team was responsible for all product experiences that we shipped to our customers.
I've tried to highlight the work that I was directly responsible for, but it was definitely the product of collaboration, not just within the design team, but also with engineering and product teams.
I've tried to highlight the work that I was directly responsible for, but it was definitely the product of collaboration, not just within the design team, but also with engineering and product teams.
Challenges
As a media asset management platform, there's a lot going on. There is infrastructure behind the scenes which enables industrial grade production and management of media assets.
Going mobile
It was tough enough visualising and working within and across these workflows for a large-screen product. The complexity in the product makes it incredibly hard to design meaningful experiences for mobile devices.
Video content is especially tricky to navigate and work with on smaller screens. We needed to be very intentional about the user jobs that we serve on a mobile device.
Video and non-linear collaboration
It's difficult to achieve the same level of collaboration that we are familiar with on other media types like text, documents, and graphics, when it comes to video content. There is an additional time dimension.
Any collaboration in a video asset would have to be pivoted around the time axis. This requires novel interaction patterns that would prove effective for collaboration.
Scoping down
A fairly broad set of user jobs were identified. However, not everything is effectively accomplished on a mobile device. We scoped down based on a framework which prioritised seamless synchronous collaboration as this was an area that had impact across all workflows.
We wanted the mobile app to be a companion to our full set of features on the web and not a fully standalone experience for an entire team.
Even though the app will work by itself to cater to a bunch of core jobs, the complex management of assets would still take place on our web experience. This helped cut down on a lot of complexity.
Information architecture & parity with web app
The Information architecture and navigation were simplified to emphasise the scoped down set of user jobs, and were pivoted around getting the right information at the right time, and synchronous collaboration on the go.
Effective Video navigation
If we look at one of the core user flows where the user is adding a comment or a tag to a video at a specific time-code, or within a range of time-codes, the tricky part is accurately marking the time-codes.
Accuracy is really important here because in a lot of times, our users leave comments or tags for compliance purposes like marking the time period where there is depiction of smoking in the scene so that we can show the appropriate warnings when televising the video in regions that stipulate that, or the time period where there is nudity or obscene language, so that those can be edited out when the video airs in certain regions.
In these scenarios the exact point where the scene is cut or the camera moves away from the flagged content needs to be selected, not just to the accuracy of a second, but to a frame.
Conventional mobile video scrubbing would not work as it's usually built to navigate around the entire video faster. Even the scrubbing controls that Apple has built into their video preview and editing UI does not consistently let you choose the exact frame that is needed.
After working on multiple iterations, prototyping and testing, we settled on an interaction pattern that was built around the pinch to zoom pattern that most users are familiar with. Pinching in would zoom a large timeline with frame-level thumbnails to a level where individual frames can very easily be selected with consistent accuracy.
Would you like to know more?
Most projects showcased here are just sneak peeks into the work that went in and are not case studies.
If you'd like to know more about any of them, drop me an email and we can catch up. I usually respond within a day.
Most projects showcased here are just sneak peeks into the work that went in and are not case studies.
If you'd like to know more about any of them, drop me an email and we can catch up. I usually respond within a day.
hi@naveen.io
Built for performance | See the tech inside →