EXM
Role
VP, Design & Product
Project Duration
2015-2018
Managed
• 10 direct reports concurrently
• 30+ direct reports over tenure
• 50+ across project team
Business Model
SaaS • B2B
Prelude
I worked on a Disney blue-sky project for The Hollywood Brown Derby restaurant. This project was focused on creating an iPad menu experience for guests and an admin portal for cast. The guests could filter the menu using dietary preference/restriction filters and the cast(staff) could update the menu using the admin portal. I served as the designer and project manager. We tested the product on-site with guests and it was a huge success. The big takeaway was how excited Disney product teams were about the admin portal. The concept of being able to manager their guest experiences directly without needing to work through a partner company was powerful.
This sparked an idea. I put together a product brief for a web authoring tool used to craft experience and publish them to devices. The product would focus on immediate hospitality needs and lean on our companies well established hospitality sales channel. Through our regular on-site visits with Disney working on various products for them we knew how badly they needed an update to their guest room tv experience and digital signage system. Our executive team approved a POC.
Overview
Experience Manager is a content management system, endpoint manager, device manager, and experience creator. It’s a scalable product built ready to pivot to a verticals needs. It’s most commonly used to managed digital signage, infotainment, and website experiences.
Challenges
Hardware
Fragmentation
Onboard storage
Onboard GPU and CPU limitations.
DRM support
Cost
Device action control
Sourcing
Hardware
Content
Admin portal
Easy-to-use
Understandable
Empowering
Scalable
Adaptable
DRM
Installation
Installers
Device registration
On-prem servers
Endpoint experiences
Performant
High-quality graphically
Impactful
Scalable
Multimodal interactions
Partners
Resellers
Proposal
Create a web based admin tool for creating and managing guest tv and digital signage experiences.
Target the hospitality market leaning on our established sales network.
Partner with hardware providers, content providers, and resellers.
Create ROI opportunities for customers to offset cost of solution.
Create impactful guest experiences which better guest retention and acquisition.
Design Process
Process summary
Problem space
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What is the business value?
Who are our users, what are their needs, and what tasks must they complete?
What does success look like for our business and users?
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Observe your user’s in their natural environment. Keep the process organic for accurate findings.
Ask questions that are as open as possible.
The goal is not to validate your own assumptions.
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Evaluate, interpret, and weigh findings gathered.
Create requirements.
Create user stories, user journeys, and other preferred guidance documents.
Solution space
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Information architecture
Low fidelity feature flows
High fidelity compositions
Design system
High fidelity feature flows
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Early feature concepts were built as interactive flows in InVision or as light-weight locally deployed builds for testing. After proven successful they are handed-off to dev for implementation.
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InVision interactive prototypes or light-weight locally deployed builds were used to test early concepts.
After features were tested successfully they were handed-off to dev. They were then released to customers where we collected analytics, were given feedback, and conducted on-site studies.
Research
Understand
Feature breakdown
Breakdown product features into understood value propositions for business and users. This includes high-level feasibility and viability assessments.
Example:
Admin portal
Why is this important?
Business - Reduces cost of content updates by removing dependency on 3rd party vendors.
Business - Empowers staff and brand to generate localized offerings focused on bettering their guest’s experience. Generates more business.
Business - Can be used to sale advertisement and generate new revenue channel.
Users - Relevant information for local and on-site offerings, events, activities, and more.
Users - Better in-room experience than the classic degrading live tv experience where I am reliant on specialized instructions to find something that interests me.
Observe
POC testing
We deployed a POC to local hotels and wineries. The system performance data, portal usage data, and customer feedback was invaluable. It lead to product improvements in every category.
We gathered unique insight on hospitality management, business needs, and guest needs. It validated my original solution proposals but also provided information to better position our product for future sales.
Overtime, we deployed to more hotels, gathered more insight, improved our product, and continued to expand. Our growth accelerated when we formed strategic reseller agreements with DirecTV, Samsung, LG, and ViewSonic. This provided reliable hardware, installers, and an expanded sales network.
Solutions
Branding
This product was transparent to end users, but not to the business licensing our product. Experience Manager’s identity was forged from the heart of our company identity. A deep brand guideline was created that detailed how to use the identity anywhere it may be used: dark surfaces, light surfaces, vertical versions, horizontal version, watermarks, swag, and everything in-between. The typical dos and don’ts.
Design system
Atomic design
All projects I have managed used atomic design. This methodology improves consistency and accelerates the entire product design lifecycle.
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They are the building blocks of design such as buttons, lines, shapes, icons, text fields, text labels, etc.
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A molecule can be created by combining two or more atoms. For instance, an input field and a button can combine to become a search form, which can perform the search function on the interface.
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An organism is a collection of molecules that have been bonded together to form complex individual portions of the design such as a login page, form, etc.
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Templates are the glues that combine the different organisms or individual sections to create a complete design. For example, the search form (organism) can be used as a template in the hero section of our home page to fetch user information. Multiple such templates, like a login form, carousel, etc. can co-exist to create an interface design.
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Everything rendered on the screen at a moment in time.
This is where we test the design systems efficacy. By seeing everything in context, we can go back and tweak our molecules, organisms, and templates to better address the design’s genuine context.
Design library
This is a snap shot of atoms, molecules, and organisms. We managed our own front-end component library in conjunction with our development team. This greatly helped the product design team ensure design quality and reduced development cost.
Icon font library
We generated and managed our own icon font library. Approved updates were pushed into GitHub saving a tremendous amount of development effort over time.
Component documentation
We managed a wiki library of components that documented redline values, interactions, and behaviors. This made design documentation incredibly accessible.
Information architecture
Management portal
The management portal was an organically growing product. Having IA diagrams of various densities kept product growth fluid. It gave the team perspective and context. This prevented redundancy, collisions, and ensured the best user experience possible.
Components
Component variants and properties were mapped to help dev build holistically. Rather then building 15 versions of a button build 1 version that includes all variants and properties needed across the management portal or guest endpoint experience..
Action processes
Some actions, such as bulk ingesting endpoints or content, had a tree of additional automated actions that needed to occur. These processes were mapped out in detail with all possible outcomes. This made complication sequences approachable and understandable.
Guest experiences
Endpoint experiences were flexible and dynamic. The management portal dictated the endpoint experience’s IA. We still needed information architecture diagrams detailing how the management portal dictated the experience beyond hero flows. Additionally, we needed ia diagrams for customer engagement purposes.
Management portal
When I envisioned the product I pitched it as being a highly flexible and scalable content management system. Create building blocks that make it incredibly easy and fast to support new content-types as the business needs. This idea was engrained within every design and development decision made through the product’s lifespan.
Call content-types in the system could be published onto supported endpoints. Because of this all content types supported guest facing cover art, titles, description, and meta data.
Images, videos, streams, audio
EXM supported a large array of content sources. Each were custom tailored for their unique file type needs but shared similar components. Talking in terms of atomic design, these content types shared many organism-components with adjustments made to their file type affordances.
Scheduling
To avoid manual content rotation we supported different levels to content scheduling.
Playlists
Playlists could be used to form digital signage play-through loops, audio playlists, video broadcasts, and more. They would play sequentially through it’s content’s with durations applied to each content source added.
Schedules
Schedules provided calendar date, time, and even custom override controls. Any content source could be added into a schedule including playlists.
Templates
We started the product off with fixed templates. Templates were easy to support, maintain, and manage.
Most of our hospitality customers did not have the in-house resources or expertise to generate guest facing experiences. Additionally, the brands wanted to restrict what their facilities could put in-front of their guests.
Infotainment
Guest room infotainment systems needed to support DRM, video-on-demand, cable tv, live streams, radio, audio streams, compendiums, itineraries, internal and external advertisement, and more.
Digital signage
Digital signage supported the same content types as our infotainment experiences. The content could be made interactive, stagnate, and/or played automatically.
Custom editor
When the time was right for our business I introduced a new custom editor. This was a tool our internal support team could use to craft new experiences for our customers or our customers could use.
The feature used a html5 canvas editor, text editing, image editing, video editing, vector shape editing, and animation controls. Any layer could be made interactive and link to other content within our system.
Workflow
To scale with our customer needs we added in workflow management. This provided role based approval flows with version control.
Users could actively ideate on a new version while the approved version was live with guests.
Drafts can be submitted for approval. Users with approval access to the submitted content would be notified. Approvers can reject with notes or approve with notes. Approved content could then be published to endpoints.
Device management
We formed strategic partnerships with Samsung, LG, and Viewsonic that gave us kernel access and DRM support. With this we could offer complete device control from our management tool.
Devices could be remotely updated, rebooted, turned off, turned on, and broadcast heart-beats that let us support emergency messaging systems.
Registering devices one-by-one or through a bulk ingestion process were made easy with deep hardware integration.
Knowing what device type was registering into our system also let us regulate what type of experiences could be published to them.
User access
Initially we created set management portal roles. This worked well for the beginning of our business but we soon had to shift to a more flexible system.
We built a user access system that let our customers build their own roles that defined a users access to content types, content directories, endpoints, and endpoint directories.
Endpoint experiences
Infotainment
Guest room infotainment systems needed to support DRM, video-on-demand, cable tv, live streams, radio, audio streams, compendiums, itineraries, internal and external advertisement, and more.
They could be controlled with a tv remote, application, or touchscreen.
Digital signage
Digital signage is more about where and endpoint is located then a definition of what experiences it affords. Digital signage, classically are located where guests can not interact with them and are used to provide information. Hospitality uses digital signage to advertise internal or external offerings..
Our products definition of digital signage differs. Digital signage are public digital displays. They can be any experience the owner choose and interactive.
Case Studies
Land to Ocean
I designed a product focused on solving current hospitality needs while future-proofing it for future business and guest aspirations.
Carnival Corporation
Carnival Corporation invested $1b into creating a transformative guest experience. Experience Manager became there tool to deliver and manage their guest experiences across web, mobile, signage, kiosks, and more. They use it today to manage their MedallionClass ships.
