Wizards Asset Manager

Changing how Wizards of the Coast manages work in progress assets and art commission workflows

Wizards of the Coast

UX / UI / UXR

Aug 2020 - Aug 2021

tl;dr
In this project, I talk about how I took over mid project and redesigned how Wizards of the Coast (Wizards) manages its work in progress (WIP) assets and workflows. I explain how I not only innovated on the previous work but how I led a team of UX designers in creating a proof of concept that helped change leaderships mind about resourcing and timelines. I then walkthrough my approach and design decisions around the Dashboard and Workspace pages and how they fit into Wizards.

Situation

Wizards had been using the same asset management software called Drake since 2004. This system was engineered using Filemaker, a data bade and prototyping tool. Drake was built in house and used as a tool to hop from paper and pen to the digital space for art and asset approvals for the tabletop game called Magic the Gathering. As Wizards grew and scaled, so did the use of Drake. Brands other than Magic the Gathering (MTG) began using this new wonderful asset management tool and the scope and use cases exploded. Fast forward to 2019, Filemaker has become a less popular tool in the industry and the amount of engineers available globally is numbered in the handfuls. Along with a restriction of qualified engineers to choose from came

15 years of quick fixes
Weird brand branches
The creation work arounds by users and engineers alike due to compressed timelines
Bugs in the system due to the nature of updating software that lives on client computers.

With Wizards commissioning more the 6,000 pieces of art a year just between Magic the Gathering (MTG) and Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), the system needed to be redesigned and updated so that

Wizards could pull from a wider engineering pool.
Workflows could be updated to match modern day workflow needs.
Simplify the complex daily work required by Drake's complex and fractured nature.

It was determined that this project was to be completed from August 2019 to mid Dec 2019. Due to the short timeline for such a massive project, I had been added to this project as UX support to the primary UX lead in September. I ultimately took over the project as UX lead mid November 2019 and had less than a month to complete a full hand off of work.

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Task

Take over and redesign Wizard's current asset manager into a simple and job role agnostic solution.

Actions

Design Philosophies

This project started with design philosophies. These were made by myself and the previous UX lead before their transition. By using these as a guiding light, we set the tone while also laying down a set of standards to grade my work against. If a decision was made that didn't fit these guides, it shouldn't be in the designs.These were born from high level business goals and UX best practices with major stakeholders, the product owner, and the engineering team.
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Communication-based Platform
Minimize errors. Facilitate the passing of info seamlessly (too many emails required).
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Self-service/ Flexible/ Agnosticism
Support New & Any IP. Support new processes on-the-fly
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Clarity
Accessible, intuitive. (Filter controls are too narrow. They require exact data entry)
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Task oriented
What do I need to do next?
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These guidelines spanned both this project and the Artist Portal.

Project hand off

The project progressed for about two months before it was then handed off from the previous lead UX designer to myself. We were given a week to go through all their previous interview notes, walked through their user diagramming and the iterations of wireframes. We talked about project direction and the upcoming project deadline one month away. We then spent time on knowledge transfer about Wizards deeply entrenched workflows, how art gets commissioned and put into games, and all the major departments associated with the project and their points of contact. I then began meeting with the engineering team and Product Owner to understand how their team worked and current daily/weekly/monthly expectations and sprint ceremonies.

Changing hearts and minds through design

After completing the handoff, I began looking at the scope of work, and weighing design options. With 3 weeks to finish the project in full and no hope of a project extension so I began cutting and reshaping the previous work trying to find a foothold to start the mountain of work. That's when I realized that the current shape of the redesign was an emulation from the previous system, Drake. There were obvious steps in visual improvement workflow optimization but it all seemed page for page very similar to the old complicated system. So restarted the design process that aimed at simplicity. I looked at the design philosophies and back at the project cut everything. I realized that the major need for the asset manager was the ability to see an asset and all its meta data, all other workflows could be managed through user side customizations. With three weeks left until the deadline, I pulled in two other UX designers and started delegating out screens with functionality requirements that I had designed and left the visual design to them as I strategized further on functionality, page layouts, and optimizing workflows.

As I presented the body of work by my team to leadership, I advocated to extend this project with a larger timeline and more resource backing to fully explore the user experience and provide the right solutions. I asked them "is this was the best solution for the the users at this time?" and pitched the idea of creating an Artist Portal that would allow artists to self service information and uploading. They answered by giving the project an open timeline, more funding, and second project to first explore creating an external site for artists. Our work became the proof of concept work for the Wizards Asset Manager.

Personas

This project restarted by using the personas previously made for the Artist Portal. This guiding light was the creation of personas. The personas were Alicia - Art Director (AD) and Gonzalo - Artist and covered their background work, goals, frustrations, and desires. Alicia - AD was primary user while Gonzalo was used as a tertiary user. Alicia managed Gonzalos work through the asset manager. These gave me the ability to ask myself what they would want, instead of what would I want.
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Mood Board

Since the Wizards Asset Manager and the Artist Portal were so closely related, I used the same mood board for visual design inspiration.

Simple UI
Product showcase
Soft or medium gray color scheming

Using the same mood board provided consistency and feel between the two projects and provided a continuity between the two.

Project Kickoff

At the project kickoff, I held a design workshop with my fellow UX designers with the themes:

Is this the still the right solution?
What blue sky ideas can we come up with?

Out of that meeting we found that we could scale back the initial designs even more, add a dashboard, and I created and planned our first remote design jam.

Design jams - Dashboard page

Due to Covid, my team and I had to learn how collaborate online. Design jams worked by having an online meeting where I gave a design prompt, then gave everyone 10 minutes to individually design or come up with ideas to discuss. We started this new process with the Wizards Asset Manager. The prompt for the dashboard was

"The Dashboard page is a soft landing into a user’s daily workflows. They are met with a number of widgets that contain information, info visualization, and or quick links to art or artists."

We iterated our designs twice and came up these first five screens and collaboratively created one amalgamation of them all.

Dashboard User Interviews

Using the work from the work from the design jam I started a round of user interviews. I sat with art directors from Magic the Gathering (MTG), Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), and Duel Masters (Duels) to see what was most important to them on a dashboard. From these requirements I created a list of must haves for the dashboard:

List of due dates
PO Statuses
List of artist being worked with
Individual art commission statuses
Feedback cycles
Pending Art reviews from other brands

Mockups - Dashboard

Armed with the new information learned from user interviews, I started iterating on the UI layout and functionality.

A word on Approvals

Between each project milestone step, I like to do a round of approvals. I start with seeking approvals from my team of UX Designers, the devs I am working with, the project manager/owner, and if time allows I try to sit with any stakeholders to give updates on progress and direction. These approval steps are a way to not only make sure the project stays on track, but also helps everyone feel involved in the design of the project.

Hand off - Dashboard

Upon completion of the dashboard mockups, I created hand-off docs for my dev team to start consuming. I provided not just screens but some annotated call outs of all widgets for hover, scrolling, and drop shadows, a short user statement, the jira ticket links for all spec details, a short description, and the requirements I worked from. All this extra info was to help the devs understand how I came to the UX and interface decisions. This helped the devs find empathy for the UX design process I followed and gave them more of a stake in making sure we as a team were successful.

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Rinse & Repeat

After I finished handing off the Dashboard mockups I repeated this exact process with the following pages:

Workspace - List view
Workspace - Gallery view
Workspace - Details view

The Workspace pages were designed to be a space to dive into workflows. Think of it as a search results page that allowed for parsing through records, editing, and navigating to the Art Details pages. The workspace is comprised of 3 views: List View, Detail View, and Thumbnail View.

Workspace - List View

The List View was made to see a medium amount of information about a lot of art records. Here, you are able to scan through many records at once looking for top level information. This view is customizable, allowing a user to change what information is seen and its order. This flexibility provided job role agnosticism allowing individuals to play with data structures and self service their own data layout solutions.

Workspace - Details View

The Detail View was made to see a large amount of information about a single art record. This view allowed a user to see all pertinent information about a particular art record.

Workspace - Gallery View

The List View was created with a small amount of identifying information about a lot of art records. Here, you are able to scan through the thumbnails of many records at once. This view allows for resizing of the thumbnails to allow for different viewing preferences and workflows.

Fireside chats and user engagement

Throughout this project I held design showcases during monthly fireside
meetings which were attended by 20-40 people including stakeholders,
department leadership, and senior leaders from Wizards. During these
meetings, I provided updates on progress and asked for and received critique
and feedback. The meetings provided opportunity to educate Wizards about the UX process. This approach garnered a lot of buy-in for the massive undertaking I had adopted.

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Results

The Wizards Asset Manager faced many uphill battles during its year of development:

The development team for this project consisted of two engineers, both tasked with upkeep of the old legacy systems and the creation of the Wizard Asset Manager at the same time.
Our initial project plan was to create a separate dashboard and workspace for each role. This turned out to be very cumbersome and required deep dives into 10+ more roles creating too long of a timeline.
Lack of buy in due to fear of missing deadlines my the intended audience due to strenuous workloads.
Changing leadership and work processes outside our control
Many reprioritizations of the dev team needed from senior leadership.

Many audibles were called to create more buy in for the project, most prominent was the idea to only focus on the front end and use that interface to link to the old system. This plan was able to entice a number of users, but since functionality never moved past read only, many users, although they enjoyed the basic use of the system, could not use it in their daily work.

Currently, the Wizards Asset Manager is in a holding pattern waiting on more resourcing and reprioritization.