Live Shot Manager
The Live Shot Manager is an application that digitizes and organizes what are called Live Shots. These are video recordings that are done remotely and not in the studios. Media Traffic wanted to improve the efficiency and speed of the Live Shot Manager.
Why: The workflow for managing live shots was very manual and communication-heavy. This was complicated and made it prone to human error.
My role: Supervising Product Designer
Timeframe: 3 weeks
End Users: Technical Production Coordinators (They schedule these shots for programming)
Activities: I helped the junior designer to organize weekly meetings with the stakeholders, product, and engineering together. We also held weekly meetings with the lead engineer to stay in sync.
Research
I modeled for the junior designer how to interview users in two groups to view how they used Live Shot Manager and understand their pain points.
We discovered the process: 1. Technical Production Coordinators (TPMs) created live shots by manually typing the information onto spreadsheets called Live Shot Sheets 2. They email these sheets to Media Traffic (the central control) 3. Media Traffic assigned routing information to these sheets and sent this back to the TPM, who 4. added this information to an online app.
Some other pain points were that the TPMs had to search in different places to book live shots. The control room received too much information via email. This created a potential for high cognitive load and missing updated emails.
Goal
Our goal was to make the system easier to use and more efficient by eliminating manual entries on spreadsheets and simplifying the reports.
The old live shot sheet
Process
I oversaw the work of the junior designer as we interviewed users and sifted through the data onto affinity maps. After we determined which features were needed, she designed wireframes which we reviewed and iterated upon.
Solution
We eliminated as much clutter as possible to make the interface simple to use. We tucked much of the information on the old screens into accordions that could be expanded if a user needed it, but initially, this information did not need to be displayed.
We made much of the metadata auto-fill the form when initial information is input. We designed an automated email as a sort of receipt when live shots are ordered and control rooms are confirmed.
This solution gave users the ability to easily scan through live shots and shows for management with minimal clutter on the screen. Accordions tucked away the granular details which were editable in-line. As users created new shows, much of the information was auto-completed to speed up the process. As all users could use this as a single source of truth, the bulk of emails and phone calls were eliminated giving back user’s time and energy.
After user testing, 100% of 5 user groups said that the new solution improved their tasking needs and improved their workflows.
Handoff
We handed off the high-resolution screens and design specs to the engineering team for production.
Before: Cluttered dashboard
After: Expanded live shot entry
After: Dashboard
New email notification
Result
Live Shot Manager improvements save $89,000/yr for licenses and billing mistakes, and 120 hrs/wk of labor.