4. Disney-ABC

Role: Categories:

Head of UX Architecture Engineering Manager | Product Owner | Exec Workshops

Period: 2016-2018
Reporting to: VP Marketing (ABC), Head of product - DATG (Disney), VP Business (ABC), COO (ABC).

In 2017 I was hired by Disney DATG’s tech department to work on ABC’s global affiliate platform, ANET. ANET was a multi-faceted gigantic platform, ABC’s hub for everything ABC Television; from the official CMS photography distributor (for ”Grey’s Anatomy”, “The Bachelor”, “How to Get Away with Murder” etc.), a custom encrypted email composer, to the ABC’s press release main source, official cross-country calendar & showtime board, official ABC distributor for Clips, videos, sizzles and “donuts” for different ABC TV stations, and the lead source for publishing official messages from ABC to the general public. To add to that, it was became Disney’s massive CMS hub for over 5,000 affiliate stations. Heavy duty!

Although I was initially hired to merely prototype the new scheduling subset and suggest a new navigational model, when I started testing and dissecting ANET’s Information Architecture, I realized the old platform’s more complex needs. The platform’s informational structure was outdated, hard to navigate and clunky, and the CMS product within It was practically impossible to manage for non-Backend engineers. Upon conducting various users interviews, holding meetings with stake-holders and sketching many cluttered user-journeys, I found that often, an ABC marketing rep’ has to go through 5, 6, sometimes 10 different steps in order to accomplish a simple task as downloading an upcoming Guest List for a show or checking the calendar for a special’s new hour.

Upon being given the larger task of re-imagining ANET, a thorough research & many internal discussions were followed with Disney’s & ABC’s execs. Diving head first into the UX of it all, I started with the re-infrastructuring of the platform’s, it’s IA, hierarchial modals and internal navigation (1), then proceeded to the hefty task of reprototyping over 180 internal pages (2), prototyping re-usable components (3), and working closely with 12 back-end engineers and leading ABC personnel. The UI arrived last (4), following ABC’s massive branding refresh. The results are now live in ABC’s secured network. Catch a glimpse of the process below;