Verimatrix is a leading provider of video services, with more recent forays into streaming support and anti-piracy tools. This project was a mix of 0-1 and legacy design, since many of the legacy tools were configured by command line interface and actually printed reports on paper. Worse, a series of mergers means many tools are on even more diverse servers and protocols.

A key goal was to make the product easy to use, not just for the existing experts but for many others. This is a secret truth of many products; not only experts use them, but lower level staffers with minimal experience and no training. Verimatrix had found that their experts-only tools were turning off customers, so easy to use was a key selling point, and became an easy card to pull when simplifying forms, and labeling actions better during the design process.

A classic web portal was created, both as a design conceit — using progressive disclosure to make dashboards and encourage exploration by untrained users — and because the services continue in the back end to come from disparate sources but need to act as a single entity to promote the unified Verimatrix brand. The portal took several weeks of discussion, modelling and working with engineering to find a technical and usability solution, and map out a flexible architecture for the site.

I created, with the in-house designer overseeing and drawing some components, a design system, and shared on an enterprise-wide Confluence. This was especially deeply defined and described because there were not enough designers to create all the pages that would follow from them. The component designs and the documentation was made bulletproof enough so developers could create compliant and usable pages.