Video Management System (VMS)

Rakuten

It was a B2B project for Rakuten, a billion-dollar company that has its own international e-commerce platform as well as a television and streaming service.

Finance and communication are the company's primary skills, as well as television and streaming.

The goal of this project was to build a SaaS management system that would allow communication companies to monitor, control, and maintain cellular antennas with the help of security cameras by using cloud computing technologies.

My role

My role was to lead this project's design end-to-end and ask all the appropriate questions.

I performed research on the target audience and its' needs, purpose of the product and possible users, to understand what are the pain points we wish to address. Everything was done in accordance with Rakuten's vision.

I have conducted a competitive analysis to gain familiarity with other video management systems available on the market, how they operate, what features I can incorporate into our product, what does not work, and how I can improve it.

I have designed a system that allows users to view information intuitively and clearly.

In order to ensure that all Rakuten's products have a consistent look and feel, I worked closely with the Rakuten design team in Japan and designed the user interface in accordance with Rakuten's guidelines and brand.

In order to stay compliant with the design, stakeholders' preferences, deadlines, and budget, I worked closely with the developers team during the development process.

In order to maintain high quality, I closely monitored the QA and consumer testing of the product before going into production.

The solutions

#1 Research and base on other systems

It was important for me to base my design on other existing and successful systems in the market, and take these ideas and implement them according to Rakuten's vision.

#2 Do your best

Taking the customer's vision and requirements along with all the research outputs, using internal users, designing wireframes, meetings with teams, iterations and fine-tuning until we get the desired product.

#3 Prioritizing

As a result of my research on similar video systems, I have designed the system in a way that will be easy to use so that all the information that has been stored will be easily accessible. The system will display a feed from security cameras, tables containing a lot of useful information, data analysis, dashboards, and reports.

The challenges

#1 No pre-existing system

This was a new product that Rakuten wanted to offer to its customers. Since there was no actual system, we were unable to find out the pain points of the system or update features.

#2 Who are the users?

Because of #1, we could not reach actual users. Moreover, the target audience was spread throughout the world, we were unable to ask them about their current usage and alternative systems.

#3 Too much information

According to Rakuten's vision, the system must contain a lot of useful information that can contribute to the daily job of the target audience, and present it in a user-friendly way.