Compass Rollouts

The scheduling teams wanted a single place where they could create/edit/manage rollouts and publish them to Finance so they could assess budget impacts of schedule changes.

Rollouts, also called Scenario Planning, are 12 months of future programming (series, movies, events) for estimation and analysis.

Why

The current process was all done on spreadsheets. They printed these out and carried them in large stacks to each meeting, shuffling through them and pulling out pertinent sheets to discuss. The planning and scheduling teams went back and forth referencing old and new potential schedules.

My role: Lead UX Designer/Researcher with 1 UX Designer

Timeframe: 8 weeks

End Users: Network Schedulers, Ad Sales, and Finance

Activities: I created a cohesive roadmap amongst stakeholders by leading product meetings to analyze affinity maps, articulate the problem, and classify metrics. I collaborated with product and engineering to ensure we had the capacity to tackle and prioritize opportunities.

Research

Discovery & User Research Method
Contextual inquiry and interviews with 15 participants to gather qualitative and quantitative data. Responses were analyzed to plan and prioritize the necessary features.

Initial learning:

  • Except for NBC, the existing Scenario Planning process involved Excel spreadsheets as well as Excel cost calculations. Communication between Programming and Finance was via email/phone/meetings and is not system-based.​

  • Scenario Planning for NBC was done in the AIM system. Finance users manually enter rollout data into AIM and update it when rollout changes require cost recalculations. Updated cost is communicated back to NBC Programming via email/phone/meetings​

User Pain Points

  • Network teams were using Excel spreadsheets

  • The updated spreadsheets had to be input into AIM, an existing tool, a process that was very manual and laborious

  • The workflow was not secure or tracked

Goal
The goal was to create a workspace where scheduling teams could create/edit/manage rollouts in a shared app. This could publish all changes to Finance for budgeting updates. The final rollouts could be seamlessly locked and flow down to final downstream system.

Process

We studied scheduling apps and in-house planning solutions to see the best way to display a grid of TV shows. No solution provided a simple way to view 12 months worth of content with metadata available at a glance.

We tried multiple solutions to stack and color code chunks of blocks with different categories of content.

Similar to Outlook

Color blocks

Solution

We came upon a solution that allows users to view all planned shows, filter by genre, hit-times and dates, and manage/add to the schedule.

It offers full flexibility to customize based on future business needs.​​

By moving to a shareable platform, we reduced manual input and risk of human error, it provided a way for network schedulers to collaborate with ad sales, research, and finance.

Programming teams will be able to collaborate and maintain uniform schedule metadata across various stations.​

Table View of previous rollouts

Card View of previous rollouts showing quick view side panel

Edit modal for a single episode

Edit modal for a series

Rollouts schedule dashboard-12 months of programming at a glance

Handoff


We delivered a series of Hi-Fi screens, a style guide, and Figma links for devs. All work utilized reusable components from our NBCUX design system for a consistent look and feel and functionality.

All designs were validated by users from Network Scheduling, Ad Sales, and Finance.