Jellysmack is a massive, digital-first company that many famous creators call home. Jellysmack-managed video content boasts an average of 10 billion global monthly video views and a cross-platform (YouTube + Facebook) reach of 125 million unique U.S. users, nearly 45% of all Americans.

In order to produce, edit, and publish the massive amount of videos released by their creators across multiple platforms, Jellysmack needed to modernize their approach to video production with a focus on quality and speed. However, Jellysmack’s production and editing workflows were a fragmented patchwork of apps made in house, excel files, Monday boards and notion docs.

This created many opportunities for error and confusion. Additionally, the creator economy was experiencing a sustained contraction that was affecting the overall profitability of Jellysmack. Our role was to work with a team of product managers and engineers at Jellysmack to improve the experience, allowing for a smoother production workflow.

On this project, I was the lead product designer responsible for interviewing users and stakeholders, synthesizing their feedback into directions for the product we were building. I was also responsible for creating diagrams and user flows to help clarify concepts and ideas with the team. My other responsibility was designing mockups and prototypes of the screens and interactions within Jellystudio.

Besides myself, I worked with a UX researcher, my manager who led the design direction as well as several product managers.

Our first steps were to conduct interviews with other members of the team at Jellysmack. We began by scheduling interviews with stakeholders and sponsors, including the president of the company, to understand their perspectives on the challenges they were facing and their thoughts on solutions (although we made sure to point out that we were gathering information, not looking for solutions yet).

We also conducted contextual interviews with editors, post production managers (PPMs) and performance managers (PMs) to learn more about their day to day work as well as challenges and frustrations.

We interviewed about 20 stakeholders and potential users, understanding the context of when they work, what their main challenges were, and what they felt Jellysmack could do to offer something valuable to creators.

After capturing notes and videos, I worked with the head of design and a UX researcher to organize the notes into broad thinking about the product. We then provided an executive summary to the Jellysmack partners that highlighted the key challenges we’d been hearing about the most.

Through these interviews, we discovered a couple of important insights:

• That many of the features that were important to creators existed in Jellysmack products, but were confusing, used complex jargon, or were not easily visible.
• There was a lot of rigidity in the current processes. Editors and creator’s teams need a lot of flexibility for various roles within a team and various jobs depending on the type of edit needed.
• Conversely, the current process was overly flexible in the wrong places. For example, there was not ability to group or categorize videos by creator even though all of the work was on a per creator basis when it came to editing and producing videos.

As we discovered some of the issues surrounding these products, our mandate became to create a minimum viable product that our internal users could begin using that would then be extended to a self serve SAAS platform for creators outside of the Jellysmack walls.

Based on feedback from the users, we started to come up with an idea for a new concept for an app that could incorporate the best parts of a few of Jellysmack’s existing apps with a robust project editing and workflow experience as well as tools to schedule, publish, and ultimately see the performance of their videos.

The main features that we determined should be built for the initial roll out were:

• Selecting videos
• Producing new videos
• Scheduling and publishing to social platforms
• Monitoring the performance of videos that have been published and using that data to inform future videos

By seamlessly incorporating these features in a logical mental model, we hypothesized that we would enable creators to have more quality control over their edits, be able to reuse and repurpose content more efficiently, and seamlessly post more content across multiple platforms – all while measuring their videos performance.

In order to maintain a strong spirit of collaboration, we began working on user flows for the major experiences that we’d defined from the users and stakeholders we interviewed. Whimsical allowed us on the design team to collaborate with non-designers easily, and we would get constant feedback. It was exciting seeing comments, both positive and critical fill up our flows and it indicated that a lot of what we were doing had salience within the company.

The first step in a typical journey for a creator (or editor) is to find video content to use for an edit. This could mean the footage could come from their existing content library or direct from a live shoot. For the content library, a user can see all of a user’s content across all platforms and where it has been used before at a glance

The gist of how this process works is that typically, a previous post is selected to create a new post to publish on a different platform. Most commonly, Youtube videos are taken and re-edited for Facebook.

Internal stakeholders and people who used this product gave us critical insights into some of the issues they were facing when they select content:

• Need to know what videos are fresh (i.e. have not been used on the platform they are being re-edited for)
• Need to focus on a single creator at a time – the content screen included all content from all creators by default. We needed to rethink how the content was surfaced to make it easier to navigate and find the best content.
• Ability to find content easily when they need to upload a video but they don’t have any fresh original content from Youtube. This means they need to have an easy way to filter content to find the best videos.

Additionally, advanced filtering options provide a way for a user to easily find exactly what they need. Since each video is run through an algorithm that detects elements within the video, a user can easily search for a topic for a compilation with phrases like ocean or movies as well as all of the metadata associated with the video.

We team greatly simplified the processes involved in selecting and choosing videos:

• We integrated the video selection experience more tightly with the video production experience to allow a creator to more seamlessly choose source content without having to switch between apps.
• We created a simpler content library interface showing easily scannable cards with access to quick actions and relevant information.
• We added to allow for easy sorting.
• More commonly used language and less company-specific jargon.
• A more flexible and modular approach to creating new content from existing content.

Additionally, a user can see in depth information about the performance of a piece of content on the “product” page for that video.

Within the projects section, a team member has access to all ongoing productions. Each project displays the most important information on the landing page. Of particular importance is the due date and what the status is.

New Project

Since editors and performance managers may want to create a new project here or from a video directly within the Content Library, we created a flexible supermodal that is used to house the new project work flow:

Post Details

Within a project, the most important section is where the video details are added. These define the video file and associated metadata that are scheduled and published on a platform and they vary between platforms, both in terms of video format and length, metadata, and api access.

Assets

Assets are the most important section for an editor. This is where they can access files necessary for the video, including creative briefs, footage, music, and images.

Each of these assets can also be assigned multiple reviewers as well and need assigned reviewer approvals in order to be published.

Collaborative Review

Within each asset, a reviewer or editor can examine a video and add comments or suggestions, and editors can reply to those comments. When a video is reviewed and approved by all required reviewers, it is able to be published.

After publishing a video, a manager can monitor it’s performance to see if it’s earning money and attracting views and engagement. This screen shows their overall revenue, expenses, and how many videos they’ve published to reach their strategic goals. Within each post, a creator can drill down and understand how well each post performs:

In addition to a much needed facelift, like the selection and production process, the major enhancements we brought to publishing and scheduling added flexibility and simplicity to the overall experience:

• Embrace flexibility – allow a creator to publish content directly from the content library, or if they need to create a more custom video, publish from a project
• Provide an all-in-one publishing area that intelligently pulls in metadata from the source content to use in the destination content and shows a preview of how the content will look on the destination platform.
• Use a more familiar calendar metaphor that shows simpler information more quickly and is more intuitive to use.

Through the onboarding experience, we wanted to create a seamless experience of inviting new users to the platform and also allow them to add themselves to teams or projects. We modeled the onboarding experience for both internal users and external creators or editors who are not in Jellysmack: