Designing a Flexible Solution to Empower User Organization
Overview
Managing content and devices in a digital signage platform can be complex, especially when different organizations—and even different teams within those organizations—have unique workflows and needs. To address this challenge, we introduced the Custom Metadata feature, enabling users to create an out-of-the-box organizational scheme tailored to their specific requirements. This feature was designed to facilitate the migration of our largest customer to our new platform while ensuring long-term flexibility for all users.
My Role
As the Lead Designer and Copywriter for this project, I was responsible for:
Conducting user research and gathering key requirements.
Aligning stakeholders, including product managers, engineers, and customer success teams.
Designing the end-to-end workflow for metadata creation, assignment, and management.
Writing clear and user-friendly copy for all scenarios within the feature.
Problems
Users of our digital signage platform had varying needs when organizing content and devices, making it difficult to provide a one-size-fits-all solution. Some key challenges included:
Users rely on predefined metadata categories such as language, region, and deployment type to structure their assets. A lack of customization options limited their ability to adapt the system to their specific needs.
Highly Structured Needs
It was imperative that admin users could define a custom field as being mandatory, so that field users could properly classify content and devices, and reduce workflow bottlenecks.
Classification Requirements
Different teams within the same organization required distinct metadata structures, leading to inefficiencies and the need for workarounds to accommodate their specific workflows.
Conflicting Internal Workflows
The previous metadata system was not adaptable to the evolving needs of users, forcing teams to rely on workarounds or manual organization methods.
Rigid Existing Solutions
Opportunity
How might we create a scalable and flexible framework that enables users to organize their content in a way that aligns with their unique workflows?
Goals
To address the problem and seize the opportunity, we set the following goals:
Develop a scalable metadata system that supports a wide range of organizational structures and workflows.
Flexible Framework
Design a solution that meets the immediate needs of our primary customer while providing long-term value to all users across different industries.
Universal User Benefit
Enable advanced customization options that give us a competitive edge over third-party CMS solutions.
Competitive Customization
Ensure an intuitive, user-friendly interface that aligns with existing UI patterns, reducing the learning curve for both new and existing users.
Seamless User Experience
Outcome
The Custom Metadata feature successfully accommodated the needs of our primary customer, securing their continued use of our product over a third-party CMS. Additionally, it provided a scalable, flexible solution that empowered all users to create and manage metadata in a way that suited their organization’s needs.
This project not only reinforced our commitment to user-centric design but also showcased the power of a thoughtfully designed, extensible solution in driving adoption and satisfaction.
A Failed First Attempt
Given that tags already exited in our platform, I initially thought that a nested tag heirarchy would be sufficient for meeting user needs. The solution would allow users to directly recreate their existing CMS structure in our platform, and even visualize how it is built.
But… there was one big problem: tags wouldn’t allow admins to require a user to input a value when that value was blank. For example, if an admin wanted field users to describe the image when uploading content, they wouldn’t be able to do so with tags. We’d need to build an entirely different workflow, and the goal was to solve for many things at once.
Flexible Data Entry
After careful consideration and review of the client’s existing organizational hierarchy, we decided on a different approach—one that enabled admin users to define what kind of values were acceptable inputs. The resulting custom metadata fields supported the following data types:
String
Integer
Date
Boolean
Pre-defined single-select lists (nested and non-nested)
Pre-defined multi-select lists
Compliance & Consistency
One of the requirements was to allow certain metadata fields to be marked as required. For example, when field users upload content, they may need to select a value for a custom field from a predefined list. However, our developers identified a potential issue: if a new field was set as required, existing objects without a value for that field would be errored out.
To mitigate this, I introduced a Default Value input that appears when a required field is created or edited. This ensures that existing objects are automatically populated with a placeholder value, preventing errors and maintaining data integrity.
Exceeding Expectations
During initial discovery conversations, the client highlighted that their metadata hierarchy was essential for identifying content and ensuring a balanced mix across their fleet of devices. While not an explicit requirement, I advocated for adding a Related Objects function, allowing users to see how many objects each value of a custom field was assigned to.
Since our developers cautioned that item counts could take some time to load, I focused on enhancing system status visibility, ensuring users always understood the loading process through clearly articulated loading screens and messages.
