Led the design of the Shotgun Design System, an award winning design system For Autodesk
Project Summary
While leading the Autodesk Media & Entertainment product design team, I was given a challenging problem: We need to redesign a multi-platform 10-year-old SaaS product for the industry, but it is used every day by thousands who do not embrace change so well.
As part of the platform redesign, we started a large endeavor we called the Shotgun Design System. Our goal was to unify the experience for users, even if they were moving between web, desktop, mobile, tablet, and software plugins. The challenge was the platform used many different technologies, from React to QT4.
Project Details
Role :
Product Design Lead
User Research Lead
Design Systems Lead
Product Designer
Duration :
1 year
Tools :
Miro, Figma
Deliverables :
Key
Team Members
Design System
Lead
(me)
User
Researcher
(me)
UI
Designer
Design System Designers
Challenges
Use Cases
Platform Consistency
The platform was initially created 10 yrs ago and was showing its age. Originally built to be utilized by large film studios, it hadn’t changed to provide tools for smaller and more nimble studios like Netflix and streamers.
Shotgun's platform of products had been steadily increasing, causing their experience to become sluggish and difficult for new users. This led to a massive amount of "design debt," which negatively impacted the onboarding experience; consequently, prospective customers were left confused and frustrated as they struggled through an overwhelming setup process that required too many steps. As existing users found themselves spending excessive amounts of time configuring projects in Shotgun, it was perceived only beneficial for large-scale operations rather than smaller ones - we needed to make changes fast!
Results
A design system with 7 technologies and contexts
Awarded most prestigious design award within Autodesk in 2016
Process
The framework we used to conduct the redesign of the Shotgun Design System was a design thinking process, slightly modified for Lean UX to work with the product team better.
EMPATHIZE
DEFINE
IDEATE
PROTOTYPE
PROTOTYPE
TEST
Research
Drawing upon our research and insights gained from working closely with key customers, we crafted a vision for the analytics platform: to provide a robust tool for visualizing production data through Shotgun Production Insights, a new suite of analytics and reporting tools empowering studios to visualize essential production metrics, monitor project progress, and make crucial business decisions proactively.
In our pursuit to refine the analytics platform, we researched various report types and defined key metrics. Leveraging Shotgun's extensive database of tracked metrics and insights from industry publications on production data, VFX pipelines, and workflow efficiency, we acknowledged the pivotal role of individuals in the production process. The flexibility to scale production teams based on workload fluctuations emerged as a crucial factor in maintaining operational efficiency.
Subsequently, based on our research findings, we initiated a sprint to rapidly develop a minimum viable product (MVP). Emphasizing data visualization accuracy, we began with sketching before diving into design tools. Through an iterative process, we rolled out a beta version to key customers, followed by a 1.0 MVP release, and continued to enhance features based on user research-driven development.
We converted technical specs into loose personas.
Shotgun has a wealth of data to extract, analyze, and visualize to provide meaningful information. We recognized an opportunity and had already done some research by the this project got started. We condensed their research into digestible personas to gain alignment and define our scope.
Solution
As part of the research, with both customers and employees, we came up with these five core values which serve as the foundation for their decisions, actions, and communication are:
Simplicity
Clarity
Usefulness
Efficiency
Discovery
Our design team started from scratch with research; based on that; we defined guiding principles.
These principles helped ground the project and gave us a starting point based on research to establish the platform's new “look and feel” look and feel.
The Design Systems team that I led, was made up of a combination of a few dedicated designers and developers, as well as a mixed group of other designers and developers that had a dotted line to the initiative. We went through several iteractions of the design system, both for React components, iOS components, Quicktime 4 for desktop applications, and components to be intergrated into 3rd party desktop applications, such as Priemere, After Effects, Maya, and Nuke, among others.
Without our knowledge, the larger Autodesk organization was paying attention to what we were doing.
During the first all-company Design Summit in 2016, our team won the inaugural Autodesk X Award, highlighting the best techical and design innovations of the year.
Because a large number of Shotgun users were using our Artist interfaces, which were based on a “dark mode”, we made sure the Shotgun Design System included a “dark-mode”
Autodesk design leadership, who was starting to work on a global design system for other applications, decided to incoporate our “dark mode” as their standard system components for their larger more comprehensive design system.
It was amazing for us to see the larger organization’s love for the work we were doing on the Shotgun Design System.
Not to long after we finalized the design system and started incorporting it into Shotgun’s development, Autodesk had a large reduction in force, and sadly a large number of our design team was imp[acted. The system can still be seen in Shotgun’s new interfaces.
Design
The increasing demand and intricacy of visual effects projects have prompted production companies to explore various methods to optimize their workflow. Accomplishing tasks efficiently and economically necessitates seamless coordination among multiple sites, departments, artists, and locations.
Producers are dedicating significant efforts to meet scheduling requirements, yet the existing array of tools available in the market falls short of adequately addressing their needs.
My design team needed to translate dense engineering requirements into an intuitive, out-of-the-box experience. The goal was to give studio leaders a high-level overview of the health of their projects, with the ability to dive into details to see how time and resources are used. We wanted to help streamline studio operations by removing the guesswork, and turning production data into real insights to make better decisions, faster.
After expanding our scope and securing team approval, we explored integration possibilities to create a cohesive system rather than an overly customizable dashboard. By carefully selecting which metrics to analyze and how to present them, we aimed to establish industry standards and enhance user experience within the Shotgun ecosystem. Our goal was to facilitate early bottleneck detection, enable detailed analysis, and prompt necessary corrective actions within Shotgun
Recognizing the varied user motivations for accessing the app, whether out of curiosity or specific information needs, we prioritized highlighting areas requiring immediate attention. This approach ensured that users could swiftly identify and address critical issues within their projects.
Our initial focus was on burndown charts, particularly in the realm of game development. To ensure accuracy in our visualizations, we developed a spreadsheet with idealized values to test the system's integrity at its most basic level. We identified hierarchy as a major challenge, understanding the significance of viewing both task breakdowns within a sprint and forecasting progress across the entire project.
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