Media Manager v.3 Usability

Accordent was a California based business with about fifty employees, specialised in the commercialisation of video acquisition hardware and software, multimedia streaming, and management of multimedia presentations through a media management system.

Accordent Media Management System v.2 – Portal

Accordent’s clients were primarily large corporations (Fortune 500), universities, and institutions who purchased the solutions for their managers, academic staff, medical personnel, students, communications personnel, journalists, scientists, stock brokers, etc. for a variety of uses including marketing, internal training, e-learning, e-commerce, collaborative research and development work, intracompany communications, etc.

Version 2.0 of Media Manager was very successful with Accordent’s clients in that it was the first platform that allowed them to acquire, organise, search, publish and define access levels for the multimedia presentations created with the Accordent software, along with various other sorts of text, graphic, audio and video files.

The new version (3.0), as defined by the roadmap, needed to expand use beyond strictly technical users, support multiple languages in addition to English, improve usability of the publicly accessible portal, and streamline the most frequent tasks of the administration system, while maintaining advanced management options for the more expert administrators.

With these goals in mind, I was assigned to design the information architecture and the user interface of the portal and the administration system of the new Media Management System.

With the roadmap documents and the product requirements definition in hand, the User Interface team I was leading met with the technical support, software development, sales, sales support and quality assurance teams in order to create an overview of the product status.

We gathered customer and end user feedback, drew up some typical user profiles and compiled use cases and workflows. We then moved to the phases of design, wire framing, mockups and prototyping.

After several testing cycles we identified the most functional user interface patterns, proposed the new solution to the teams involved, and gave a beta version to several clients for testing. We then made some modifications, tested and produced the new UI in collaboration with the development team.

The new version of Media Manager was welcomed by customers and end users alike who appreciated its versatility and ease of use. Media Manager v.3 and its updates won considerable commercial success in the US, European and Asian markets, tripling installations and earnings over the next two years and contributing to the acquisition of the company by Polycom in 2011.