Client: PhotoShelter

PhotoShelter is a Digital Asset Management (DAM) service used by many publications and sports organizations.

Problem:

Live sporting events are a real-time experience full of fast action, but producing visually-driven social media engagement by those sports teams is anything but a real-time experience.

Most sports teams have a workflow to ingest, catalog and manage their visual assets captured during events. It can take up to 30 minutes for a photo to make it from the camera to social media team. Because of the delay and drawn out workflow, teams often resort to creating post game recaps instead of being part of the conversation during the game.

Research:

PhotoShelter fielded many requests to address this bottleneck for sports organizations. I worked closely with the product manager who was working for the organizations in tackling the problem. These were the major findings:

The social media teams needed faster access to the photos. Currently, someone with a laptop and card reader would walk around to all of the photographers in order to download their memory cards. They would then have to go back to an office with available wifi in order to upload and tag the photos.
They also needed a better workflow for creating assets to publish to social media. Once the photos were available in the system, the social media team would download a photo to their laptop, open it in Photoshop, crop the image, make and apply graphics, export the photo, email it to themselves, open their email on their phone and download the photo, then import it to their social media account, then upload the new image into the DAM service to live the in permanent archive. This was obviously a very cumbersome and time consuming process.

Solution:

Business Objectives:

Create an add-on service to generate additional revenue for PhotoShelter
Service needs to be a revenue generator for sports organizations in order to justify the cost

Goals:

Create an MVP for the add-on service
Leverage the PhotoShelter API to pull in assets
Improve the workflow for creating and sharing visual content quickly

1. Composition View

To improve the workflow for the members of the social media team, we created a web app that can pull in assets from their PhotoShelter account. The main composition screen features the canvas front and center with a file browser on each side to provide the user with quick access with all the pieces they need to assemble their image for social media. The following mockups show the optimized workflow:

The canvas is front and center and flanked by two browsers for the user to quickly access the photos and graphics used to create a social image.

In the left browser the user can access game day photos as they are uploaded in real time. In the right browser the user can access prepared graphics to overlay the photo.

The user can drag and drop a photo from the left browser onto the canvas.

Below the canvas the user can choose the right template for the social platform.

The user can drag and drop a graphic overlay from the right browser onto the canvas.

When a photo is selected, advanced controls are exposed at the top of the canvas area to allow the user to scale or rotate the photo to work with the composition of the graphic.

The user can reposition the photo to create the right composition for the social image.

The user can also add custom text to the social image.

In this scenario, AT&T has paid to sponsor score updates to be shared with fans.

2. Publishing View

When the user saves the image, they are presented with a quick modal where they can compose a social media message and then share to any social media platform (that they have previously authorized with the web app). To assist with writing the message, the user can reference caption information added to the assets from the PhotoShelter DAM service. For example, if the social media team is planning to celebrate a major milestone that may be accomplished in today's game, they can craft the message ahead of time and easily copy and paste for fast sharing.

3. Saved Posts View

All the posts are saved together in a collection where the user can do one of several things. First, share the image again to a different social media platform. Second, duplicate the image and change the canvas template to better suit a different platform without starting over. Third, access the posts intended for Instagram or Snapchat from their mobile device to quickly download the image and copy the message. This screen is designed to be mobile-first and the modifies the UI for quick mobile publishing.

Route.Media - SG