Overview

Forbes was under contract with a third-party vendor (Brightcove) for the upload, storage, and organization of its video library. In order to give Forbes more ownership over the content metadata associated with video files and better streamline content operations, Forbes wanted to create new video tools in our in-house CMS, Bertie.

Problem

The contract with Brightcove expired in March 2024 and there was agreement across various teams within the company that we would like to move away from the platform and move toward an in-house solution using our CMS.

Solution & Results

The project was initially broken up into two MVPs.

• Phase 1: Allow users to manually upload video directly from story.
• Phase 2: Design a video manager dashboard that will allow users to manage assets.

As we continued talking the project out, we realized Phase 1 could not happen first. But design work for Phase 1 had already begun.

The user is served a modal after they begin the upload process

Switching gears after design work had already started did not present a problem. We had approached this from the beginning of allowing the product to scale. The experience was designed so it would be the same regardless of whether the user is uploading from a story or from the dashboard. But pivoting also meant we had to make the MVP as lean as possible to hit a launch date before the end of our Brightcove contract.

I leaned on other existing patterns in the CMS to create the layout for the dashboard of the media manager. We needed to allow users to upload, edit, and delete videos as well as see what videos they uploaded vs what videos exist in the library.

Initial designs for the video manager dashboard

Instead of using a modal (an existing functionality for uploading video), we switched to a full page experience for video upload. The user needs to fill out the required fields and once the video is uploaded, they get a confirmation.

The modal becomes a full-page experience

Based on tech restraints, we had to design for the CMS to handle the upload while a third-party handles the hosting. Because of the third-party, the video would not be immediately available once the user uploads it. We showed this in two ways: a banner alert to let the user know they need to wait for an upload confirmation in their e-mail and a video card showing the progress of the upload to the third-party.

Video cards on the dashboard

View Live Site

Please reach out for a demo of the video manager on production.