Paddington – A Design Quality Audit Platform
UX Design concept for an Amazon internal tool
Problem statement
Imagine…
You are a Visual Designer at Amazon Prime Video
You work on thousands of images a day for various movies, shows sent by hundreds of studios.
One of your tasks is…
…to QA/QC images. What is QAing images?
Carefully checking thousands of images made by the studios to make sure the images aren't repeats, fits within the Amazon Prime Video design guidelines and flag images for accessibility issues, graphical content and various other problems. You then explain this as feedback to the studios so that they edit the image and resend it. This process is otherwise known as "Quality Audit" , "Quality Checking" or "QA/QC"
But you have to do this QA process and provide feedback to the studio for each image over email
A diagram of this process:
If only there was a tool for this like...
Paddington - A Design Quality Audit Platform
UX Design concept for an Amazon internal tool
Introduction
What is Paddington?
Paddington is a concept for an internal Amazon tool which assists Prime Video Design Quality Auditors to audit images from studios that go on the Amazon Prime Video Channels storefront
March 2022 - October 2022
Research
Initial questions
I started by doing a bit of work to contextualize the problem. I needed to identify some key considerations:
What is the value of the tool?
Who is this tool for?
Where and when would this tool be used?
Value proposition
Why should it be made?
During my initial research, I explored the frustration of our customers (the Prime Video studio partners) and understood that they wanted to be able to create the images that go on the Prime Video storefront using their own design resources. I also explored their frustration with having to send their created images to the Prime video team over email rather than having everything happen on a clean tool interface. They also were unhappy with receiving feedback on the images over multiple email threads that their designers would then have to peruse through, gather and implement. The below diagram explains the problems in the current process.
Current Process of QAing images over Email
Personas
Who is this tool for?
Persona 1:
Design Quality Auditor (DQA)
Needs:
The ability to review and provide written feedback on each image provided by the studio
To view the image with the Amazon visual guidelines over it
The ability to use a pencil tool over the image to provide visual queues for my feedback
The ability to upload attachments to my feedback
The ability to review my feedback before I submit it
Nice to have:
I also want the ability to provide my feedback on the image as comments per image
I want the ability to choose from commonly provided feedback
Persona 2:
Studio POC (Point of Contact)
Needs:
A way to send Prime Video their image files
A way to receive feedback on the images.
The way the feedback is given should be clear and concise so that they appear as easy changes to implement
Nice to have:
I want the ability to upload the finished image assets into a place where it will be assessed rather than emailing the assets to the Prime Video team
I want a separate stream for each set of images so that the feedback on one campaign doesn't overlap with another campaign's images
I want to see a side-by-sde comparison of the image with feedback and the new image I upload before I send it back to Prime Video
I want some way of flagging unread feedback
Context
Where and when will it be used?
Location:
In Amazon’s internal systems for quality audits of Prime Video Channel images.
In the studio POC's browser to view feedback on images.Timing:
Used continuously throughout the content review process to ensure studio-provided images align with Amazon’s visual guidelines.Platform:
Desktop-only, tailored for larger screens to facilitate detailed, side-by-side image comparisons.Workflow Integration:
Embedded into DQAs' daily tasks to streamline review, tagging, and feedback, helping maintain visual quality for Amazon’s streaming platform.
This led me to ask
The big question
How might one design an internal tool that will help both Studios and Design Quality Auditors perform Audits on images in a way that the studio partner has a clear visual picture of the auditor's feedback?
Ideation
Design Tenets
Avoid context switching by providing all tooling necessary for personas in-house
Provide all interaction points for the persona in a single UI
Avoid overloading the visual experience of the persona by providing minimum interaction points
Remove the need of special skill currently required in the audit process
Avoid color oriented interaction points and favor icon/text oriented ones
Use rounded edges to provide a visually friendly experience
System map
How it all connects
Lo-fi Design Wireframes
The bare-bones design
There are 2 sides to this product:
1) The customer facing side i.e. the Studio
2) The business facing side i.e. the Quality Auditor
Studio facing Lo-Fi Mocks
Amazon Employee facing Lo-Fi Mocks
Interaction Design
Bringing the design to life
Quality Auditor facing side
"Where do I start?"
The Quality auditor enters the tool to see the campaigns with feedback required and can go inside to see the images that need to be audited inside each campaign.
Drawing over images & adding comments
The Quality auditor can then open an image and audit it using the 'comment' tool.
Preview your feedback
The Quality auditor can click outside to preview the audited image with the feedback and without and then "Mark as audited"
Keeps a track of your audits
Once the Quality auditor clicks "Mark as audited" the image will move into in the "Audited" tab
Approve images easily
The Quality auditor can also click "approve image" and the image will appear in the "Approved tab"
Studio facing side
Upload your images
The studio enters the tool to choose a campaign type and upload the images for that campaign to be reviewed.
You've got mail!
Go to the 'Feedback received' tab to see the images with feedback sent by the studio
Upload & compare
Click on an image to view the feedback comments provided. You can then upload your new images and compare it side-by-side to the old one.
Hi-Fidelity Design
A fresh coat of paint
Visual Design & Typography
I was curious to see how the tool would look as an actual Amazon tool so for the appearance of the tool I experimented with Amazon's internal Cloudscape Design system component library.
OPEN CLOUDSCAPE DESIGN
Conclusion
Projected Impact
The current process of providing feedback over email took about 3 hours to review 1 campaign as it involved downloading images onto the computer, opening photoshop to perform the review, exporting out the images with the review callouts and then composing feedback over email with the exported out images attached.
Current process time taken: 3 hours/campaign
Tools used: Outlook shared mailbox, local storage, Photoshop
With this tool the estimated time taken per campaign would be 20 mins to review 1 campaign (approx. 1 min/image) as the entire review would happen within Paddington. There would be no need to switch between different tools in order to perform the image review.
New process: 20 mins/campaign
Tools used: Paddington
Impact: This tool would reduce the time spent on each campaign by 1.5 hours/campaign.
Reflection
Previous Iterations
The designs I didn't use
Why I didn't use them
Thanks for viewing!