Content Retention
Design updates to the content retention admin tool - adding an impact modeling feature, conducting research and design sprints, and redesigning the audit and history pages.
Content Retention.
UX DESIGN OVERHAUL
Content retention is an important feature in the Panopto's systems settings, allowing admins to set retention policies to archive or delete old content on their video content management system.
​
After interviewing customers, our team decided we needed to update our content retention page to include more useful features and overhaul the user interface.
TIMELINE & TEAM
PROCESS SUMMARY
This work project began in the Winter of 2022 and I was the main designer on this feature. The initial designs were handed off and completed by January of 2023, but we are making more additions to the content retention feature in phases.
​
Team:
Main Designer — Amy Zhang
Mentorship & Guidance — Alla Taborisskaya
Project Manager — Jay Minster
Developer — Greg Young
I worked with my design manager, Alla, to interview customers to identify their needs in regards to content retention, then pinpointed a design direction, designed and prototyped in Figma, and produced redlines for dev handoff. After implementing the feature, we performed a round of retesting with customers to find out what they liked and disliked about the feature. Finally, we settled on a design that was both discoverable and easy to use.
SCOPING THE PROJECT
What's the problem?
Panopto's Content Retention tool does not currently meet customer needs, is confusing to navigate, lacks design consistency with the rest of the product, and lacks a way to model policy impact. After doing a comprehensive test of the current tool and interviewing some key customers, I compiled a list of issues that we need to address.
Customer Feedback
IDENTIFYING ISSUES
After compiling the issues with content retention, I concluded the biggest issues were: a lack of clarity in navigation and data presentation and a lack of a policy impact modeling feature.
Three tasks in one
The Content Retention feature is a very important admin tool, and required many steps to figure out the priority of what to fix, when in our rollout process it can be developed, and how to evaluate success criteria.
IMPACT MODELING
TASK: Create & redline a new feature that allows users to create "what if" reports, detailing what would happen if specific retention policies were applied to certain folders.
​
SUCCESS CRITERIA: Get spec approval and design developed and shipped
POLICIES FIXES
TASK: Identify the main issues with the retention policies tab and create design proposals to address these issues.
​
SUCCESS CRITERIA: Completion of research into the typical Panopto admin and creating design solutions for all issues.
AUDIT & HISTORY
TASK: Perform a design overhaul of the audit and history tabs, as they are confusing to the customers.
​
SUCCESS CRITERIA: Implement the design changes in phases starting with P1 and ending with P3.
IMPACT MODELING
Policy impact reporting
Through further investigation with our customer success advocates, we found that giving our customers a way to model policy impact was our first priority. Because this was a new feature, it was important to create a flow chart to think through the user's actions and needs.
Strings & redlines
I created the final designs for the new policy modeling reports section based on another designer's explorations and produced redlines for the first round of developer handoffs.
PRODUCT ANALYSIS
Tackling the issues
After implementing this policy modeling impact functional change, he next step in our design process was to investigate other aspects of the content retention user experience with user stories and make UX improvements.
NAVIGATION
As an Panopto admin, I want to be able to navigate my content retention interface easily, so I can apply proper retention policies to my content.
POLICIES UI
As a Panopto admin, I want to easily parse the UI of the Policies page, so that I can find the default policies quickly.
EDIT POLICY
As a Panopto admin, I want to quickly understand how to edit an existing policy, so I can accomplish my policy changes efficiently.
LEFT MENU
As a Panopto admin, I want to understand the page structure of the Content Retention feature, so I can efficiently make changes to my policies.
POLICY APPLICATION
As a Panopto admin, I want to be able to see which policies are applied to which folders from the Content Retention page, so that they can eliminate going back and forth.
IMPACT MODELING DISCOVERABILITY
As a Panopto admin, I want to be aware of the new impact modeling feature, so that I can better understand the impact of my policies on my video content.
New documentation
During this project, I noticed that our current dev handoffs and Figma docs were not well documented with our priorities and design spec info. Therefore, I created a new template that the design team could use moving forward to help prioritize issues and hand off information between team players.
User personas
Next, I created a collection of user personas for the groups of people that would be commonly using the content retention feature. This collaborative research helped the design team further understand the user groups that would become Panopto admins. See Firmographics for more in-depth customer research.
GROUP 1
Shreyas Krishna represents the Panopto admins that are on the enterprise side of our customers, and also the ones that prioritze cleaning up their video content management system.
GROUP 2
Anabel Richardson represents the education side of our market, which is the majority of our customer base. She, like a lot of our customers, primarily use content retention features to save money with our storage plan.
POLICIES FIXES
Multiple solutions
The next step was to create low-fidelity iterations starting from the most important issues (P1). I noted details about each solution and how much dev time each option would require.
API Error handling
During the process of working with devs on realizing this project, I needed to consider the error-handling edge cases that could occur. This process included tackling some new error-handling design patterns.
PATTERN ADDITIONS
Panopto's design system grows and changes with the introduction of new patterns from new projects.
Second Dev-handoff
The second dev handoff focused on the P1 issue of making the impact modeling feature more discoverable for admin users and making minor changes to the Policy page.
AUDIT & HISTORY
Audit & history
Other than the impact modeling and policies tabs, the audit and history tabs are some of the most used content retention pages. In their current state, there is a lot of ambiguity and lack of functionality.
AUDIT
The Audit page allows admins to see which videos have been flagged by a retention policy and will be actioned upon (archived, hidden, or permanently deleted) on the action date.
HISTORY
The history tab shows the history of items that have been actioned upon in the past as a result of retention policies.
Outcomes & design changes
Other than the impact modeling and policies tabs, the audit and history tabs are some of the most used content retention pages. In their current state, there is a lot of ambiguity and lack of functionality.
A VISUALIZATION OF THE SPEC
The PM on this project, Jay Minster, put together a Google docs version of the design spec, but I created a new version with focused details pertaining to the design to accompany the project as a visualization.
Design by phase
Because we didn't have the bandwidth to make all our changes at once, the design changes were broken into different phases based on our prioritization framework. We iterated different designs in a Crazy 8's design sprint based on phase and included only the most crucial changes in our P1 designs.
Prototyping & finalizing
After outlining all the changes and conducting a technical design review to confirm the feasibility of the designs, I created the final P1 prototype to show a broader audience and prepare for dev handoff.
PENDING ACTIONS
After conducting our string review, we made the executive decision to rename the "Audit" tab to "Pending Actions" to provide a more descriptive title for the table that customers see. The page shows the actions that are pending approval from admins as a result of an audit.
Redlines
To make the dev handoff for P1 changes as smooth as possible, I compiled all the changes into a master list and broke them into functional, visual, and string changes.
REFLECTIONS
What did I learn?
The Content Retention improvement project was a multi-faceted endeavor, combining my skills in customer research, building a new feature, redlining other designers' work, and updating an existing unuseable design. Reflecting upon this project, I learned quite a few things:
FLEXIBILITY
In a team project, sometimes you don't always get all the context from beginning to end. For the impact modeling piece of the project, I was tasked to pick up the redlines and work with developers to implement without being the one to research, iterate, and design. Being flexible and jumping in when necessary is an important skill for a UX designer.
NEW PROCESSES
When others more senior than you don't have a clear process defined for a design, you can be the one to spearhead the change. For this project, I was able to define a new format for pain point documentation, research, and redlines.
PHASING IT OUT
Project managers and devs don't always have all the resources to produce all the designs immediately. Instead, I learned to create phases depending on priority and allow devs to tackle the most important changes first when the headcount is low.
Congrats! You made it to the end of this page.
Hope you enjoyed coming along for the ride, and I truly appreciate you taking the time to check out my work! You can reach me at amyzh425@gmail.com — I'd love to chat with you.