Spectrum AMP

Role:    UX/UI Design, UX Research and Testing, Writing Requirements, Developer Handoff and Maintenance

Tools: Whiteboard, Figma, Lucidchart

Overview: Spectrum AMP is a media processing, management, and delivery application used by news and media providers to ingest, transcribe, process and use videos in digital and linear news avenues. 

Media Delivery Service (MDS) was a long standing backend application used at Spectrum to process and store videos. MDS processes and stores full length shows and movies, and short format video clips. Videos are uploaded to MDS to be transcribed, transcoded, and captioned to be used later in the media delivery stream to digital and linear avenues. MDS processing worked dependent on a developer intervention to upload, initiate processing, and push to Comcast’s MPX for producer access and storage. 

Acting as a backend application alone, Media Delivery Service prevented news producers from being autonomous in the delivery and management of short term video content. By adding a usable interface to MDS in the development of Spectrum AMP would make these services usable to news producers at Spectrum, and create potential for the application to be packaged as a SaaS product. With increasing urgency of news and the use of vod clips in news outlets, the Spectrum News & Sports department had the need for producers to be able to upload, manage, access and use videos to access in Datlet and AP Workflow to create content to use in the news without intervention of a web developer to intervene with the processing of the video.

With the existing needs of Spectrum News and Sports and the hope to package MDS for a SaaS platform. We would design an interface for MDS to be used by producers by creating Spectrum AMP. 

Problem 

Without a UI, news producers are not able to use MDS processing without the intervention of a development team, and reliance on MPX (media management platform by Comcast), limiting their autonomy and speed in producing news.

Goals:

• Select and Upload Video and Image Assets
• Display and manage asset details
• Display processing status of asset
• Move away from reliance on MPX
• Create quick upload for producers in the field working on mobile devices
• Create product to brand and sell to different areas of Spectrum and outside of Spectrum 
  

Process & Deliverables:

• Information gathering 
• Current state review
• Requirements refinement 
• Information architecture and login and authentication structure design  
• User flows/sitemap 
• Wireframes 
• Prototype testing and stakeholder review 
• Design review and refinement
• Developer handoff 
• Ongoing support and enhancement

Solution

Spectrum News and Sports teams need a digital solution to upload, process, and manage their videos.  

We identified the main functions of Spectrum AMP to be media file upload, processing, management, and storage and looked to competitor solutions for insights to inform the design patterns and functions we used. 

File Storage and Management

Looking to MPX, what our producer teams were accustomed to using and Google’s media file storage, and organization structure again for user familiarity. We designed a file organization table with summary side panels with a summary of file details, a preview and sharable URLs, and access to file designated pages for more file editing and management capacities. The larger application is organized by news station teams, and files can be searched and filtered by Name, Station, Uploaded by, Upload Date, and Processing Status, giving users the ability to find and monitor the processing status of files in the system. 

Mobile Upload

For the mobile solution, it was important that producers could easily upload videos in the field. We realized that some of the file management, and even access to other stations files, really wasn’t important for mobile users, would likely complicate their experience, and would be a heavy lift for the development team. We streamlined the mobile experience to login, upload files, and monitor the progress and success of that upload. Knowing users were accustomed to applications like vimeo and youtube, we pulled patterns from each upload experience to match the needs of our field producers while streamlining the process as much as we could to simplify their uploads, knowing they would likely be busy and the process needed to be expedited to go to production teams to be put on air.

User Roles and Permissions

User roles and permission structure became a large component of the UX conversations and collaboration with the development teams. Our current user base consisted of different members of a news production team that had varying needs and should have different levels of access to editing and managing files. While also considering how we might package the product for sale later down the road, the user role structure was strongly considered in development. Super admin management functionality was considered and designed for a later state in the platform, giving an administrator the ability to adjust CRUD permissions to roles for varying levels of files within the platform.

MVP Solution

For the MVP solution we designed a desktop solution to upload, process, manage and store media files implementing a user login and permissions used by other Charter applications which allowed use of Charter ESSO already in use by Spectrum News and Sports teams. For the mobile version, we developed a simplified solution allowing field producers to upload files to be accessed and managed downstream by desktop producer users. The MVP could act as a pilot for Spectrum AMP to be used by Spectrum News and Sports that could be enhanced to be adjusted to meet the specific needs and branding of other teams and organizations.