Internal Video Curation Platform

RightNow Media has a robust internal tool (code-named: Curator) that was developed in-house to manage, upload, and curate the video content for its platforms. This tool was in need of a structural change to allow for internationalization and curation for different languages and regions.

What is Curator?

The Curator platform affords our team the ability to upload and manage video series, teachers, publishers, banner ads, and collections of series, called shows. In addition to the media, Curator also affords the Publishing team the ability to create and manage online study guides and external supplemental resources available for download or publishing.

Content curators also heavily utilize Curator to populate the video content within the RightNow Media applications. This content typically appears in rows (called channels). Curator allows these internal users to choose where the content appears within the channel.

The Problem

2019-2021 heralded, among other things, RightNow Media's push to expand its audience internationally. Unfortunately, Curator was not set up to handle multiple languages. Additionally, our content was curated in the same way, no matter where our users were in the world. That meant, even though we may have specific content for that user in their language, we could not effectively curate the most relevant content for them.

The Goal

We needed to provide a way for the users of Curator to create and manage content in multiple languages and allow the curations of content within language groupings. All fo the Curator users are internal, so any improvements to the platform increase team productivity, which is always a win for the business. Additionally, the greater flexibility we can provide for our international partners makes it easier for them to create content, making it easier to expand, thus greatly benefiting RightNow Media.

Strategic Design

Preceding the design, the decision was made to utilize Bootstrap to speed up the development process. This let me utilize the Figma Bootstrap UI kit to efficiently lay out the pages a sprint ahead of the development.

One major addition was creating a whole new path after logging in: curators could either manage content (videos, banners, study guides, etc.) or they could now enter the Experiences portal to select regions and manage its content.

To manage multiple languages, a curator could create variants of the same piece of content for any desired language instead of having duplicates for each language, a previous problem with English and Spanish content.

Testing

Given the fact that all users were internal, we were able to get immediate feedback to both designs and the development. The languages portion was incredibly complex and underwent a few iterations until it met their needs.

Launch

The updated Curator was launched in December 2021 to the much singing and rejoicing of our internal curators 🙂. The platform is faster and easier to use, ultimately meeting the stakeholder and business goals!