Case Studies

How Culture Machine Increased their video generation output by 10times

Design Strategy • Interaction Design • Visual Design • User Research

Video marketing is one of the most powerful storytelling channels for brands and influencers. 93% of brand-led video communication happens on YouTube, a 21st-century tool that continues to evolve every day around user behaviour and view ability trends. Despite the rise of many other video platforms, YouTube continues to enjoy a steady stream of followers and users.

Many YouTube channels lack a clear content strategy which prevents them from reaching their viewers. A lack of subscribers and falling views are clear indications of what happens when you launch a video channel without much thought. To solve such problems for media planners, CultureMachine launched its unique platform which typically focused on building a solid strategic foundation for video entertainers on YouTube.

About Culture Machine

Video marketing is one of the most powerful storytelling channels for brands and influencers. 93% of brand-led video communication happens on YouTube, a 21st-century tool that continues to evolve every day around user behavior and viewability trends. Despite the rise of many other video platforms, YouTube continues to enjoy a steady stream of followers and users.

Despite the rise of many other video platforms, YouTube continues to enjoy a steady stream of followers and users.

Culture Machine built two platforms to launch and manage YouTube videos at scale. They were:

Intelligence Machine

a technology platform that featured content catalogs and segmented based on genres and trends to help viewers and subscribers find great content

Video Machine

a video creation platform that can fasten the process in seconds. Both platforms can be combined to enable publishers to derive more value from their YouTube activities.

Impact

Understanding the construct of a video: Any image or footage combined with an Audio makes a Video. Culture Machine understood the potential of creating videos at scale and they formed partnerships with leading publishers like Sony Music, T-series and the like to convert all of their audio content into video and publish on platforms like Youtube. This suddenly opened up additional opportunities for publishers and Culture Machine was building the technology that was going to make this happen. We now had to design the entire video creation process for them.

Process

Research &

Discovery

Design Plan

Workflows

Wireframes

Visual Mockups

UI Dev

The product was divided into four parts. Asset Ingestion, Library Management, Creation and Reporting. Asset ingestion was a way to bulk import audi hard drives onto the cloud for which videos need to be generated. Library Management housed images and footage from various sources like getty and shutterstock. Creation module allowed creators within Culture Machine to generate videos using the available assets. Reporting module was a dashboard that gave metrics that could help track production, performance and status of the various catalogs.

Culture Machines flagship Video Machines’ overall product flow

Research and Discovery

During this phase, we spent a lot of time understanding the requirements, their current way of working and the challenges they face. This was achieved by interviewing, immersion and observation techniques to cross reference the data points and arrive at design problems to go after. Their process was fairly manual and involved a lot of jumping across various tools to make a basic video. Even after this they would create the wrong videos and publish them which then had to be taken down and republished after making the edits to fix the problem. We came up with an execution plan to build a product that can solve the challenges Culture Machine faces in video making.

Workflows

Once all the scenarios have been mapped, the workflows were created for each of the scenarios. This gave a sense of how many unique screens and sub-screens needed to be designed. We involved the developers early on(much before screen design begins) so that they can start planning the functional aspects needed for the product. Workflows allowed all stakeholders to agree on the “how”

Wireframes

In the wireframe stage, we did the majority of the heavy lifting. The goal here was to nail down the entire functionality and UI elements. We consciously stayed away from building anything using the digital tools early on. This was to achieve two things. One was to get as much clarity as possible before going to the digital UI and the second was to enable for faster iterations. This significantly simplified the processes later on and all of the feedback is caught here and decisions are made quickly.

We typically got all the right people in the room - PMs, Engineers, Users and the Designers, ran marathon meetings, presented wireframes on paper in a flow and collected feedback on paper and immediately made changes on them and showed it back the following day. This would otherwise take a whole week. Once the wireframes captured all agreements, they were made digital and sent over for a final round of feedback. The changes requested were very small and cosmetic and we covered all of them in the visual design phase.

I have worked with a lot of designers in my time at companies like google, intuit and the like but this team truly stands out. Anurag was the core person who made all the difference.

Venkat Prasad, Co-Founder & CTO

Culture Machine being a digital media company had a set brand guidelines. We leveraged that to create our color schema and started designing the product. The Visual Design phase involved creating all the screens, making sure it follows all principles and making a click through prototype for a usability study. This allowed us to catch usability pitfalls and capture other feedback through the study. We would test with 12 people for each module that was designed before moving on to the next one. Once the feedback was discussed, I would send out an executive summary, get agreement and quickly implement all changes before moving it to UI dev.

In UI development we used HTML & CSS, Bootstrap 2 and basic javascript for form validation.

This is a picture from a usability I was conducting with the user it was designed for

Role

I was leading a team of 3-5(varying capacity). During this time I was hands-on in all phases and also took care of managing the project. I personally was driving the research and interaction design and client communication pieces for the project. In the end it was a well received project and was the first successful project for UXReactor. The engagement lasted for over a year. This engagement involved a lot of travel to Pune and Mumbai for in-person interactions.

I wanted to create a mix of human intelligence, visual designing benchmarks, and collaborative ideation to achieve the end goals. These proved to be the primary reason responsible for the success of the product. The entire product was left to me to drive the outcomes entirely in my very first project which showcased my intent to deliver a high-quality product by collaborating with cross-functional teams, driving meaningful conversations, and collaborating more often to transform results