Rather than fully reinventing the wheel for an antiquated industry, our users welcomed us with open arms for bringing in the mindset of improving existing process. Designing meant pinpointing where would our users be working, what sort of workstations would they be on, and what other monstrous technical constraints we would face. Editors are reluctant to leave what is comfortable, and what works: so we worked in the margins of their deadlines, established naming conventions, and familiar softwares. In this process, our User Journey Map became our north star: search would simply feel like a magic wand in their updated toolkit.

Designing for Kino was designing for months of footage, hundreds of cameras, years of scripts. One semester ago, I had taken a documentary-making class. I felt familiar with Premiere Pro (& dare I might say, comfortable, with Adobe CC), but I was thrown into a world of Avid, full-time loggers, and thousand dollar sets that ran 24-hours a day.

I learned not to drown in data. Set your constraints. Scope your specs. Choose your user persona(s) and make them your champion(s). Identify the problem to be solved, and don't lose track of it.

In a team workshop, we identified there was a significant and lucrative opportunity to help editors during the part of the film-making process right before editing: where teams transition from uploaded footage, to categorization.

I would argue searchable footage is a blue ocean because it tends to be removed from the video editing process, into work-streams like Excel and Avid. Competing in search isn't making a better DaVinci Resolve, or Final Cut Pro. Studios & producers are hungry to invest in software that shortens the time it takes them to edit quality films. This blue ocean is an area worth innovating & competing in.

Post-research & testing, refining my design meant abstracting features to their core and building them up with layers of minimalism. Our dark mode had to be extremely minimal to look clean with the density of information we had. I learned to minimize dashed lines and fills without creating too much elevation (this isn't 2016 MUI ;)

I would keep to <4 layers of elevation: leaning on icons, menus, and shortcut based interactions like popovers and contextual menus. Advanced users preferred a balance between shortcut-enabled actions and added panels: this keeps things clean and powerful.