Disney Music Group Harmony Platform

At Disney, I led the end-end product design for Harmony — a web-based platform aimed to modernize the entire suite of legacy applications used by the Disney Music Group (DMG) organization. Its purpose is to streamline and integrate the financial and music production processes across the entire division,  resulting in increased efficiency and boosted revenue. 

DMG is the music branch of Walt Disney Studios. They handle all matters related to record labels (Walt Disney Records, Hollywood Records, and most recently, Fox Music), Disney Music Publishing, and Disney Concerts. Traditionally, music publishing and music production operate separately in the music industry and thus generate separate revenue streams.

Since Disney owns the majority of its music catalog across all three sectors (record labels, publishing and concerts), Harmony would be the first integration platform of its kind— one that would make Disney a pioneer in transforming the operational structure of the music business.  I had the fortunate opportunity  to create this platform  over a two-year span.

Problem Solving to Improve Productivity


Time Wasted, Less Efficient

In the existing space, employees had to perform painstaking manual tasks for most of their day before they could dig into their real work. 

GOAL:
Allow users to focus on high value tasks, reduce time & cost associated with low-complexity tasks, decrease long-term operating costs


Not Personal, Complicated

As the line gets blurrier between customer-facing and enterprise apps (think Slack, G-suite, etc.) the new standard is a push for not only functional, but customizable and intelligent design. 

GOAL: Rebuild and modernize the work ecosystem, accommodate for the long term increase in business volume, promote self-organization


Lack of Visibility, Disconnected

The existing data and information systems across the landscape were siloed. Employees were performing identical processes that were being done across different applications that didn't speak to one another. This resulted in fragmented workflows and people having to send numerous emails, phone calls, running reports, etc. just to get simple questions answered.

GOAL: Unify data across the organization, increase visibility and awareness from one workflow to the next, create a space where data is aligned and properly communicated, create one unified resource for data.

 

 

The Solution

The DMG Harmony Platform


The phase 1 delivery of the project had three clear initiatives:

1. Foundation

Provide users with uniform task-driven tools: the Dashboard, Workbench, and Global Search. All three features provided aggregated views that pulled data and information from other apps within the platform, enabling quick research and decision making.

DMG User Need:
"What tasks should I focus on today, this week, this month? What's happening across other departments that might be affecting my work?" 


2. Revenue Processor

With continual growth of international and domestic revenue streams, the volume of financial data (via sales transaction files from Youtube, Spotify, Fox, etc.) was increasing exponentially. The goal of the revenue processor was to provide 100% visibility across all phases for the finance and accounting teams. This would ultimately ensure that revenue flowed more quickly into the hands of music talent every month.

DMG User Need:
"Allow me to clear transactions faster while quickly identifying new opportunities for financial growth."


3. Unified Music Catalog

Everything in the music business begins with a song. From there, it stems out to components like talent (artists, producers, writers), contractual information, and everything in between (lyrics, tracklists, audio/video assets). All of this data needed to be organized, aligned, and reimagined so that any user could have full visibility of the DMG repertoire and one unified source for any song entity. 

DMG User Need:
"Allow me to see every album that we released internationally for Lion King in 2019." 


 

 

Here's how I lead the design across all three areas.

DISCOVERY

My research process was two-fold. First, I partnered with business analysts to understand the current space (processes, pain points, etc.).  I also looked to common industry resources such as books on the music business and sites that could provide me with more context around the use cases I would ultimately be designing for.

Next, I used my insights to form a research method called “Activity Mapping” — designed to unpack future-state needs from my end users. This method leveraged ideation workshop techniques (being quick and collaborative) and conventional user interview questions. Over the course of three months I lead 28 sessions and spoke with 65 users. We received feedback that informed the entire platform design and will continue to do so in the years ahead. This Activity Mapping method was also leveraged by other Experience Design teams across Disney.

A time-lapse of one of the many activity mapping sessions I conducted with my users and product team.

Creating a Space for Our Users to Ideate

A lot of this was about guided facilitation and being clear about our objective. I wanted to give my end users the floor to not only share what they do, but openly ideate on potential future solutions. The more they understood our end goal with this process, the more they were able to get excited about it and participate. Ideation workshops are so valuable because you're finally collaborating creatively with people outside of your product/design domain.

Process-driven Analysis

Our team held the intention to think beyond how users interact with the existing technology stack and to think beyond their process, since we were potentially reshaping their process. My aim was to see where we could encourage more efficient behavior and a more efficient way of accomplishing tasks.

Our research also served to anticipate potential future challenges. To do so, we had to think adaptively about the features we were designing and building. This allowed our designs and development to be more flexible to potential needs down the road:

 

 

DESIGN EXECUTION + VALIDATION

I worked with two product owners,  business analysts, and 15 engineers to complete this project. This required constant collaboration and transparency with my product team. Every stage of ideation began with concept clarity - making sure that everyone (product owners, analysts, developers) was aligned on the definition(s) of what we were designing in the first place, from every user flow to every screen. This consisted of numerous whiteboard sessions, agreements on terminologies, dozens of sketches, user flows, etc. This was a very rigorous and challenging effort but led to very meaningful, intuitive, and feasible design solutions.

We incorporated validation in every stage of the design process. The benefit of working on an internal product for the company you work for is that you can constantly and quickly validate your ideas with end users. On a weekly basis I would meet with my end users either in small groups for usability sessions or in larger focused sessions with up to 50 people at a time. 

The Foundation

Scalable UI Library

We created an entire custom Material UI library that adhered to  Disney's enterprise applications style guide standards, i.e. the distinctly Disney look and feel, including icon and typeface. Each feature — all the way down to the components — be cross-functional so that different teams across the organization could leverage the same features.

One of our primary design objectives was to provide users with the means to customize and configure their views across the platform. A big challenge was designing UI that made large sets of data more manageable for analysis. We put a strong emphasis on typography, to achieve higher contrasts and heavier font weights and passing the WCAG 2.0 AAA standards.

Dashboard

Our users were already using data vis. tools like Tableau. While we didn’t want to replicate what they already had, we did want to make the Harmony data vis. experience more compelling, so we leveraged music-industry and music production insights from the DMG catalog and other existing data stores. We took the time to ideate with users on what kinds of insights would be good indicators alongside their domain-specific, Tableau-adjacent data. E.g., What songs are about to be released and how is this affecting the trends I am seeing? What recording contracts are on hold and how is that affecting our royalty account setup process?

Workbench

A system-generated task list that picked up all the manual work that was being done in the existing workflow. Users would access this list at the beginning of their day, potentially filter based on level of criticality, and prioritize actions that required critical human decision making and/or exception handling -  handling issues that can't be solved using automated thinking.

Global Search

Search was the most highly anticipated feature we designed. It would be the one tool that would get every user the quickest answers, no matter where they were on the platform. It would serve as a discovery tool for new users and those who were unfamiliar with the DMG data, helping them understand the breadth of information available to them. For power users, it would be the much welcomed replacement for all the reporting tools and ad-hoc excel sheets they had been using for research.
 

The Revenue Processor

Process Driven Data Views

Allows users to easily see an overview of allocated, suspended, and unallocated sales and enables users to efficiently send transactions downstream.This new level of complete visibility and tracking progress at each step meant a few things: minimized risk, paying out music talent faster, and speeding up the revenue cycle. A faster cycle results in receiving cash faster and that cash would be put towards DMG opportunities.

The Unified Music Catalog




Song Detail Pages

Since the majority of our end users would be using the unified catalog to discover and compare large quantities of song metadata across segments (Pixar, Marvel, Walt Disney Pictures, etc.) we saw an opportunity to create one of the most exciting and engaging applications yet to exist. 

  • Unified views: these pages were the direct result of the unified data model, providing a single view of both publishing and recording data in a way that felt coherent
  • Media integration: immediate access to album art and the ability to play audio of tracks and download WAV / MP3 files of each
  • Tagging attributes: providing users with an at-a-glance way of identifying key attributes of each song such as the Union Obligations (e.g. AFM/SAG-AFTRA) or genres (Family friendly, Male Vocal, Uptempo)

One of the more exciting aspects of Harmony platform was the integration with media. Users would have the ability to view album artwork, listen to tracks, and download audio files across the catalog.

 

 

COMMUNICATING DESIGN

Since the product development process moves very quickly, I had to make sure my team had the support they needed. This meant constantly working ahead and anticipating what the product owners and developers needed weeks or even months before each sprint cycle.

In order to accomplish this, we collaborated closely with our lead developers in the majority of our ideation sessions to understand potential tech constraints and opportunities that could optimize out designs. We also held weekly one-on-ones with them to discuss any technical questions or roadblocks. 

When it came to output and deliverable, it was essentially all about user stories. We co-lead the efforts in writing out the details for each UX/UI story with our product owners and business analysts, being sure to include references to mockups and documentation.

Having built a very trusting relationship with my product and development team. They would reach out to me before sprint planning to help refine the backlog, based on user feedback and insight that I gained. This shaped my understanding for the agile process and how truly effective it can be with the right team cohesion.

 

 

UAT TESTING + PRE-LAUNCH SUCCESS

This platform launched in the Fall of 2020.

KPI goals achieved pre-launch:

FOUNDATION

  • 50% reduction in tech support for business as usual by switching to more efficient systems that need less attention
  • Screen render for global search < 500 ms

REVENUE PROCESSING

  • 85% Increased visibility into all data processing
  • 70% of revenue processing done automatically

UNIFIED MUSIC CATALOG

  • Increased visibility and accuracy of catalog to potential licensors including comprehensive self-service capability
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