DISNEY DIGITAL STUDIOS
Art Direction
Experience Design
User Interface
Research
Usability Testing
A one–stop project management portal for Disney Digital administrators to create production schedules, assemble teams, create budgets, allocate resources, and generally maintain control and transparency over multiple productions at once.
The portal also creates a pipeline for crew and studio users to gather assignments and documentation, scripts, call sheets and production schedules.
CONVERGING NEEDS
The principal challenge of this project was to converge the best features and functions of existing, desperate applications that Disney uses, such as Studio Binder, and Synchronize, to create an integrated user experience that ensures far–reaching production control, rapid resource allocation, and ease of use.
That task was to ascertain the needs of the three use cases: administrators, crew, and studio users.
RESEARCH
I conducted interviews with crew, studio, and admin users, and met with studio leads to define the user stories, identify pain-points, and create the initial user flow.
Understanding the complexities of rolling onto a new film as a crew member who needs access to schedules and assignments, a studio member who needs access to utilities and content, and a studio admin who understands the production as a whole and grants access, was key to formulating a singular solution for these needs.
I immersed myself on–site at Disney Studios, conducting interviews, building personas, and understanding the culture before starting to sketch and build wire–frames.
PROCESS: PARALLEL VISUAL DESIGN + PROTOTYPING
Leading UX and visual designers through use–cases with very little time for prototyping and testing forced me to carefully ration my team's time and strategize our design approach.
DASHBOARD PROTOTYPES
Our solutions needed to be sound very early on. Routine team standup meetings, regular presentations to studio leads and executive directors, and effective design sprints got us to a viable concept quickly.
FINAL DASHBOARDS
I created a consistent design language early on, and leveraged it in high–fidelity wire–frames, so that we could go to final visual design polish quickly.
STYLGUIDE:
DEFNINIG A SUB-BRAND
In the process of building a viable portal to unify Disney production needs, we wanted to identify Disney Digital Studios' unique function and culture within the growing organization.
A TOOL, A PROCESS, A SUB-BRAND.
There were two objectives for this project: create a viable product that unifies diverse studio needs, and introduce a design process and agile workflow into Disney culture.
The final platform illustrates how we can capture extremely diverse needs across departments and the lifespan of film productions through a singular digital experience that brings heightened transparency and control to complex operations.
Strong, consistent visual systems encourage the element of trust in the platform, and reinforce the Disney Digital Studios brand.
I found the dynamic between my design team and the Disney studio very valuable going both ways.
As I apprenticed myself to learning about film production and the people who make it happen, the Disney team was able to take away some great design best–practices, and see the inherent advantages in a truly agile, collaborative design process.