Revolutionizing workflows for leading creative teams
Joining the PhotoShelter team after their B2B offering proof of concept was debuted, I was able to help develop the product into a beloved and irreplicable tool for creative teams. It grew from a few dozen organizations to thousands, dominating the sports and university markets and keeping an exceptional 96%+ retention rate.
PhotoShelter for Brands
Redesign / Library v2
What necessitated this change?
2017
From the start I evaluated the Brands product (previously known as Libris) as a first time user would experience it. I documented the points of confusion in UX, copy and marketing using eye tracking, audio and visual recording.
What I found was an ecosystem of apps that don’t share a common look, voice, or care for the user. A user could find themselves in a whole new app with a single click with no explanation as to where they were or why things changed. Every screen had a significant learning curve and treated the product as a repository of individual, unrelated features instead of focusing on workflows or anything beyond one user type.
Every new organization required significant hand-on time with a customer service specialist to get up to speed and their library set up for use. This was a clear place where an even slightly improved UI and UX could make a huge impact.
Combing over years of past customer service tickets and sales feature requests mirrored and added many more points of friction in the app. This helped to shape the questioning and results we were looking to get out of our future user researching. To get these questions answered and assumptions validated, we needed to talk to customers.
The Customer Council was then created; an ever evolving group of customers in a variety of verticals and locations whom we would interview, understand their workflows, and continue to test with as time went on.
We interviewed each org for at least one 60 minute session, mapped their organizational structures, workflows, metadata, and so, so much more. The more we understood each user and how that user interacted with their coworkers, the easier it was to start creating user and org profiles. Finding these repeating patterns and commonalities in similar and disparate verticals created dramatic efficiencies when creating future features.
When prioritizing what work or features needed to be done first, it was incredibly efficient to be able to point to a profile and see exactly what the impact and reach would be.
Understanding the users workflows before, during and after the files were in our system was vital to figuring out where we could make the most impact. No two organizations were the same, but there could be multiple similarities in which a single new feature could make a world of difference.
For example; we found that if the social media team wasn’t a totally different team from the person in control of these assets being held in our system, they would almost always be welcomed into the asset library as an editor, where as if they were a different team, they usually had little to no access whatsoever. In that case, if PhotoShelter was to focus on making sharing to social media even easier, we could fairly confidently see what the immediate impact to our current users would be and where it may be more gradual even if the companies that shared these characteristics were otherwise nothing like one another.
Being able to get a snapshot in time of a team’s workflow not only helped our current understanding of their process, but it also helped us to understand how their needs evolved over time and what factors contributed to that. It could be anything from a gap in budget to simply not knowing that other efficiencies could or did exist.
If the efficiencies did already exist, we could attempt to understand why they were unaware of it and how we might’ve been able to help others who were be in the same situation. If the efficiencies didn’t exist, how might we be able innovate and make a real improvement to our offering and possibly even create something novel in the DAM space.
By the end of the initial research effort, we knew not only what needed to be improved on the product in the short or long term, but we knew our users sentiments about our company, our branding, our marketing and sales effectiveness, and even how to empower them within their own companies. What started as an initiative to understand how our users used our product resulted in tangible information to act upon across all departments at PhotoShelter and paved the way for the next 6 years of product improvements and steady growth.
2017-2022
In the years that followed, these were just some of the initiatives we then planned, designed and implemented:
Reworked organizations’ ‘portal’ search experience and making it mobile optimized
Redesigned batch downloading to be mobile responsive with an enhanced and clear experience
Made the user’s current location apparent and general wayfinding and navigation easy to navigate
Streamlined the typography and iconography, to use a singular style
Making the visual differentiation between container types and file types clearer
Remade the concept of ‘Lightboxes’ into ‘Workspaces’ that allowed for uploading, conversation and approvals for a better team collaboration experience
Expanded and refine the permissions system to allow for more flexibility when sharing content
Designed the native iOS and Android apps for all user types to efficiently download content
Focused on meeting AA accessibility guidelines for all facets of our products
Created dozens of general and customized integrations with other apps, such as Adobe, Slack, Wordpress, and so many more
Outlined the near-term and long-term functionality of users consuming their own analytics
Designed the system and look of notifications, toasts, emails to users, always expanding alongside features
Redesigned and refined the technical range of the PhotoShelter Desktop Application
Created a new structure for managing metadata in the Library across all files and metadata types
Designed the system in which multiple library accounts could exist under one parent account leading to a larger Enterprise level product offering
Plotted out and designed the implementation for integrating AI recognition of objects, people, logos, etc into our system
Reworked the Image Expiration system to be more apparent to users and customizable to administrators
Outlined the design team’s methodology and operating process
Standardized the user testing research process as well as the dissemination of that information to the entire company
Created an official design process and worked with dev to integrate it with their system
Worked with Dev to create a component library for more rapid development and execution
These initiatives were all sorts of shapes, sizes and took various amounts of time. They all, however, shared the design principles of consistent user focused design and were the subject of hundreds of user testing and research sessions.
Above you can click to see a full breakdown of all the possible userflows for a user on the Libris ‘portal’ permissions system when trying to download a file.
Just one example of so many.
2023 and beyond
Last but not least, in 2022 we began a complete redesign of our entire system from the code up to the UX and UI. Dubbed “Library v2”, every last pixel has been painstakingly assessed and improved upon to be the sum total of all the lessons we learned through the years.
