Building the future of media production with an all-in-one rundown, automation, and newsroom platform

Stakeholder Management

Coordinated across a wide range of stakeholders, including public entities, broadcast agencies, legal teams, and internal departments. This alignment ensured milestones were achieved without compromising the product vision.

Facilitating Collaboration

Structured judgment-free discussions to encourage diverse ideas from teams across the organization. Insights from developers, customer support, and executives were integrated, shaping a product tailored to multi-layered needs.

UX Meetings and Design Thinking Workshops

UX Meetings and Design Thinking WorkshopsFacilitated human-centered UX meetings focused on actionable and pragmatic design strategies. These sessions balanced visionary goals with real-world application, fostering innovation and alignment.

Strategic Flexibility

Balanced long-term roadmap priorities with high-profile client needs that aligned with strategic goals. This adaptability bolstered revenue, publicity, and product relevance.

Scalability and Growth

Adoptede an open API approach which supported integrations like Automator and Storiez, enhancing functionality and demonstrating the potential for future market verticals.

Implementing Just-in-Time (JIT) Design

Implementing Just-in-Time (JIT) DesignIntroduced a JIT design process that cut design waste from 66% to 2%. Designs were taken to high fidelity only after stakeholder approval, ensuring efficient resource allocation and immediate actionability.

Enhancing User Independence

Simplified user interactions with self-service features like “blocks” and “columns,” increasing user independence from 75% on TinkerList to 98% on Cuez. This reduced customer support reliance by 23%, allowing support teams to focus on critical tasks.

Streamlining UX Meetings

Reduced weekly UX meetings from 20 hours to 3.75 hours by eliminating redundancies and implementing clear decision-making frameworks. This accelerated design validation and execution.

We also mapped out workflows to identify inefficiencies and unnecessary approval steps, eliminating choke points where the absence of key decision-makers could stall progress. Below is the original mapping of the product design and development process. The streamlined process is confidential and cannot be shared.

Automating Feedback Collection

Automated user feedback analysis using AI to streamline insights, enabling the team to maintain high responsiveness without expanding staff.

Qualitative and Quantitative Research

Combined qualitative interviews, surveys, and shadowing with analytics data to cut wasted effort and time. For example, interviews revealed dark mode was essential for production teams working in dimly lit environments.

Customer Feedback Integration

Synthesized insights from customer support channels and platforms like Amplitude and Hubspot. These findings guided continuous iteration through bi-monthly "D-Day" sessions. These sessions involved close collaboration between UX and development teams, ensuring prompt fixes for emerging issues.

Competitive Analysis

Identified gaps in competitor platforms, emphasizing Cuez's openness, cost-effectiveness, and plug-and-play functionality as key differentiators.

Customer Journey Mapping

Collaborated with Customer Support, Sales, and Marketing to map and redesign the customer journey, improving touchpoints from awareness to subscription. This improved customer experience and onboarding by integrating cross-department insights into a cohesive strategy.

Overview

Cuez is a next-generation all-in-one platform for managing rundowns, scripts, and live productions. It empowers media professionals with real-time collaboration, seamless integrations, and flexible workflows, making it ideal for modern media production environments.

Modular components

Designed a flexible “blocks” and “columns” system for customizable workflows. Blocks serve as core content elements that can be simple or “smart” based on user needs, while columns act as metadata fields. This modular structure ensures scalability and allows quick updates across all instances.

Customization and Accessibility

Developed customizable views, including rundown and script modes, with options for resizing, filtering, and rearranging elements. Integrated WCAG-compliant standards to ensure accessibility for all users.

Real-time collaboration

Enabled seamless team collaboration for live productions, ensuring synchronized last-minute changes and a smooth editing experience.

Live Prompting

Co-designed with teleprompter operators, the Cuez prompter offers a simple setup, intuitive controls, and direct script integration. Features like text mirroring, adjustable sizes, and block filtering ensure efficiency and ease of use.

Modular Design Library

Led the creation of a tokenized design system, reducing transition time from ideation to execution by 75%. This library ensures consistency and adaptability across platforms, with development-side integration planned for the future.

Overview

The Automator app simplifies live show workflows, allowing users to create complex automations without technical expertise. From cueing cameras to playing videos, Automator transforms production into an intuitive and efficient process.

Seamless Setup

Connecting Cuez to the Automator app was designed to be effortless. Users authenticated via a secure, device-based method rather than individual accounts, ensuring smooth integration in live studio environments and eliminating disruptions caused by missing personnel.

Collaborative Design Process

Developed through workshops with directors, producers, and showcallers, Automator's design reflects real-world needs.

Results

Automator has become a flagship feature of Cuez, streamlining production workflows and gaining consideration for a standalone platform.

Overview

Storiez is a newsroom computer system (NRCS) designed to manage stories from field reporting to multi-platform publishing. Integrated with Cuez, it offers a comprehensive solution for newsroom and live broadcast management.

Research and Development

Insights from bootcamp sessions, field interviews, and competitive analysis informed Storiez's design. The platform addresses inefficiencies in traditional newsroom workflows, offering a centralized, story-driven system.

• Bootcamp Sessions: Initial brainstorming workshops with stakeholders laid the groundwork for the platform's concept.
• Field Interviews: We mapped detailed newsroom workflows, highlighting inefficiencies like the chaotic journey of breaking news from field reports to final publication. This helped identify the need for a centralized, story-driven platform.
• Competitive Analysis: Insights from competitors' shortcomings guided key differentiators in Storiez, ensuring it met unmet needs.

Research and Development

This example highlights the complexity of workflows in a small-to-mid-size newsroom agency. With input from users, panels, and collaborators, Storiez was designed to streamline these workflows and minimize breaking points regardless of organization size.

Story-Centric Platform

Storiez adopts a story-centric approach that supports both “story to publish point” and “publish point to story” workflows, making it easy to create and adapt stories across multiple platforms. Each story acts as a “folder” containing key elements such as Story Items (content versions tailored to specific publish points), Dossiers (supporting information that may not be published), a Media Repository (all media related to the story), and metadata options for additional details. This approach allows journalists to efficiently manage and adapt stories, ensuring that information can be repurposed across different channels without repetitive work.

Integrated Planning and Assignment

Storiez includes tools for planning and assignment that mimic traditional newsroom practices. A calendar-kanban hybrid interface supports story prioritization, scheduling, and assignment, allowing teams to manage and organize stories for coverage. Journalists, camera crews, and other staff can be assigned to specific stories, enabling newsrooms to monitor who is covering each story, equipment use, and scheduling for live productions.

Modular Mapping and AI-Assisted Editing

A unique feature of Storiez, Modular Mapping, enables flexible content adaptation across various publish points. Users define the fields required by each publish point and map them to story properties, allowing information to propagate easily. For instance, a story's summary field can be mapped to generate a tweet, while content is adapted for other platforms like websites or TV rundowns. AI-assisted editing then adjusts language and tone based on each publish point's context, allowing for quick adaptation of stories without compromising on brand voice. Final edits can still be made by users, combining automation with manual oversight to maintain quality.

Ongoing Development and User Feedback

Storiez evolves through continuous user feedback, usability tests, and live betas, positioning itself as a flagship tool for modern media environments.