GMUSIC
UX/UI Design
What is Gmusic?
First, what is Globo? The largest media company in South America, Organizações Globo, was founded in 1925 by journalist Roberto Marinho in Rio de Janeiro. The conglomerate includes magazines, newspapers, and the biggest TV network, Globo Network, with 1,222 owned and affiliate television stations throughout Brazil.
Television is still by far the most important vehicle in Brazil, reaching 98 percent of the population. TV Globo Network, which invests significantly in journalism as well as being an important producer and exporter of soap operas, is the leader with a market share of 48 percent.
Gmusic is part of Globo's Corporate Solutions Hub. It is Globo's musical content management platform, providing a centralized bank of original and commercial music, bringing productivity gains in artistic research and financial efficiency, ensuring assertiveness and traceability in the flow of requests, reports and payment of musical rights.
With over 650 active users, Gmusic has more than 6000 monthly accesses, over 10000 musics in the library and an average number of 10000 downloads monthly.
This project is under NDA, so I am not able to show live screens and the whole Gmusic platform.
About my role
Being a UX Designer in an existing product
The product was created about 2 years before my arrival. And it has a complete team of developers. I adapted perfectly to the team and its routine. My role was to make sure that the users had the best experience using the service and ensure that the new features were aligned with the core business. Some needs were already mapped, but I helped define new needs and UX priorities for the product.
One of the features I worked on was the Batch Ingest Module.
About the process
Product Definition
Together with the Product Owner, Business Owner, and other stakeholders, we defined Gmusic's goals for the quartile. We saw that many users were still using external (and paid) media libraries mainly because they were not finding what they wanted when searching our library.
These insights were extremely valuable to the Music Production team, as they could improve what they were creating for the platform. Also, we identified the need for a process of uploading music in batch, in order to facilitate the area of Music Production when placing new songs on our library and making them available to sound engineers.
As it is a new feature integrated to Gmusic, the new ingest process is still improving its numbers daily.
Research
With easy access to users, I started interviewing them. Initially, individual interviews were carried out with selected users as a sampling of different production areas for a qualitative assessment. In parallel, I set up a questionnaire for a survey among all editors and sound engineers in order to raise quantitative data on usage and needs.
I also spoke with Music Rights and Music Production stakeholders to understand their needs and how they use the service and how this new ingest could improve their performance.
Analysis
After collecting all the data and compiling the information, I could see that for sound designers, quickly having the essential music for the products they are working on is not only necessary, but if not, the entire creation and editing process can be harmed. From the point of view of Music Production (which is responsible for putting the songs in Gmusic), the time spent to register the songs individually, or ask for it to be done outside the system, resulted in a loss of productive capacity and consumed a lot of human resources in the process.
The need for an automation in which the steps were clear, transparent and provided real and constructive feedback for the Music Production team became clear.
Design
Starting with the existing single file ingest flow design, the first wireframes were quickly transformed into low-fidelity prototypes for concept testing with stakeholders and a few users and technical validation with the team's devs. Soon after, the final canvases began to be drawn.
All design elements were made in accordance with the elements already existing on the platform and the design was done in Sketch, with the screens and components sent to Zeplin to be worked on by the Devs.
Validation
User Testing
With the design created, a prototype in high fidelity was made so that I could test with the users of the Music Production team if the feature was compatible with their needs and if the use was in accordance with the main usability rules.
The tests I performed showed some small adjustments that, once resolved, validated the tool from the users' point of view.
Stakeholders Validation
With all the feature information gathered, I made a complete presentation of the functionality to the Business Owner and to the managers of the areas involved in order to present the complete solution and how it resolve the problem we identified in the beginning of the process.
After presenting and answering some doubts and questions, based on the data collected throughout the process, the project was approved and could be moved to the upstream and put into production by the development team.
Conclusion
What have I learned?
This was the first of some features that I've created, end to end, for Gmusic. So it was the first opportunity to develop a complete work, taking advantage of the facilities to do surveys with users and stakeholders.
I took every opportunity to collect the necessary data that supported me throughout the project and that, without a doubt, would have been lacking in the final result had I not had them in hand.
Some difficulties, especially regarding knowing the right people to talk to in critical moments, were overcome as I could count on the collaboration and support of the team's Product Owner, with whom I exchanged a lot throughout the entire process. mainly to know better about the product and also about business aspects.
Outcomes
