Artist profile management tool
Viacom’s MTV Artists platform connects a massive artist database with a variety of applications built for global brands, including MTV, VH1, CMT, and BET, as well as event brands like the VMAs. The data that lives in the Artists platform represents the latest releases, music videos, live performances, photos, and artist-specific content. The tool houses data on everyone from your favorite recently signed local band to Beyoncé.
Happy Cog’s charge was to redesign the application user experience, ensuring that a variety of users can update their artist information easily, from any device at any time. This means an indie band manager needs to be able to record a performance at a bar on her iPhone, then painlessly upload that clip to her band’s MTV Artists profile on the same small screen, likely from the road over a spotty connection. This also means that Viacom’s premium record label partners need to be able to manage hundreds of signed artists frictionlessly.
- Services
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Brand, Design, Development, Strategy, and UX
- Industry
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Arts & Culture
By redesigning the user flows in collaboration with the internal Artist product team, we were able to streamline processes, shorten steps, and reduce clicks. Autofilling a Google Map based on locations input by individual users provides a sense of immediacy and personalization. By adding critical wayfinding and directions throughout, we were able to reduce support requests. Smart interactions and charming behavioral states deepen engagement. Status messages and updates tell artists when their content has passed through Viacom’s critical legal and content reviews. Finally, label partners can unlock a deeper level of site support needed to manage the sheer volume of updates they require.
Working in partnership with Viacom’s internal engineering team, we plunged into our first Grails application build. Once the initial clickable redesign was live, we cracked open user testing to validate some of our earlier hypotheses. In many cases, our UX decisions were supported by data. Where optimization was possible, we adjusted some of our design thinking without hacking the core of the experience or information architecture. The result is a frictionless, surprisingly brief user interaction that drives return visits by artists refreshing valuable content continuously.