Ethos Group owns many different types of products. Cyclops is a video monitoring system used by many of the company’s clients. The VMS is a critical piece of what Ethos Group reps use to educate and train dealership leaders on effective sales, F&I and service functions. Cyclops helps clients file, sort and recall video more quickly than any other product in the marketplace. Since Cyclops is one of the company’s older apps, the app lacked core usability principles and visuals. With this project, I contributed through User Research Planning, User Story Mapping and Wireframing. This project has been been shipped.

Problem Statement

The current VMS software had a very outdated user-interface which made it difficult for current reps to have access and rate videos on the Cyclops software. In order to create a more seamless experience, I had to completely re-design the old user-interface to something that was more user friendly and intuitive for the current users. How might we redesign the user interface to allow users to seamlessly browse and filter information while using the VMS platform?

Challenges

Updating UI and Improving on usability while still preserving some of the apps base functions

One of my biggest obstacles when working on this project was making sure the design decisions I made were feasible. There were instances where I would send design iterations to the Project Manager and was given feedback to change things up as it was not a possible feature to implement/ or implementation could possibly hinder the app’s already developed backend system. With this challenge, I had to force myself to think outside of the box and how my design can be used effectively while being integrated to the already existing system for Cyclops.

Pinpointing how people used the application with very little to no exposure to Cyclops

Research was definitely a large part of this process — understanding how Cyclops currently worked and specific user pain points and gain points. I also did a fair share of research on successful VMS platforms and thought of ways I could include features of these platforms into Cyclops. It was initially difficult for me visualize what the application should look like, but with help and communication with my team of Project Managers and Designers, I was able to get a grasp on how the product was used on a daily basis.

Takeaways

Although the testing process was out of the range of my internship, I felt that working on this project was extremely valuable experience. One of my biggest takeaways from this process was the importance of integrating into existing system.

Since the application has been last designed in about ten to fifteen years ago, I had to understand the many limitations that could be held over my designs. In the initial stages of sending my designs over to PMs, there were several instances where I was told my designs were not feasible and they could not be implemented with the backend system of the application.

This made me reconsider a lot of my design decisions and furthered my reiteration process. Overall, this was a fun project to work on and I was excited to work with something related to media content.

This project is protected under an NDA! For more details please contact me ghosal.monica@gmail.com