Platform: Web, Mobile |  Year: 2016 - Present  |  Website: www.briefy.co

“Trusted by 26,000 photographers!”, It was the tagline of our 1 euro stock images business website. One day, we were requested to use our “26,000 photographers” to provide photo shoots for properties all over the world. So, why not send more of our photographers on shoots to produce personalised and exclusive imagery? This is how the story began.

To comply with my confidentiality agreement I have omitted and appropriated confidential information. These designs are a reinterpretation of the original.

What is Briefy? ​

Briefy provides professional visual content for business at scale, manages visual content service from A to Z. ​In the platform, business can place their order directly and download the result images with various ways. Our exclusive photographer apply the jobs on-demand worldwide. Now, Briefy has already delivered more than 10,000 set of contents. 

Who am I in the team?

I identify the pain points of stakeholders. Providing and prioritising the possible solutions to those problems, wireframe and prototypes and test. Due to long term lack of developers in the team. I implemented knack, a online database solution, to test my ideas and provided a short-term solution to the company. Now, more development team members have joined, and I am working on prototyping specific internal tools and conduct user testing regularly.

The business workflow

The business flow contains multiple stakeholders. Externally , we have the client, Internally, we have project manager, talent scout, photographers (creatives), quality assurance and finance manager. Each of the stakeholder are connected with each other in the workflow.  

User research

I started to think about a solution which can handle the whole business workflow, keep thinking of what are those everyday pain points faced by my colleagues and how can I solved it. After that, I did the following to understand the users and trying to align the goal with business. 
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1. Interviewing all the stakeholders
I try to understand the user requirement. Questions are like “what are your main duties?” “What are the inputs for you?”, “What are the inputs from you?” “When do you do the input?” “Why do you do the input?” “Who gets your input?” “What is your feedback?” “When do you get the feedback?” and a lot of “How do you deal with XYZ situation?” “How often do you deal with it?” “Which tool do you use for your work?”
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Interviews the photographers

2. I got my hand dirty
I dived into some of the stakeholders’ positions to understand their pain. Mapping out the user journey of each stakeholder - document everything in an organised way.

Identify the pain points

In the beginning, the whole business flow was done by google sheet and google drive (Thanks google!)  and the insane amount of emails & calls. After a meanwhile, the bottleneck has already come. Google sheet cannot support the fast-growing business since it came very slow when dealing with thousands of records with uncountable external linkages. But there are way more problems out of it, Here are some of the major one.

Talent Scout	Difficulty matching creators on budget, location & skills ​Lengthy manual process to assign jobs results in frequent errors
​Project manager	Multiple communication channels for Project Managers results in slow response to emergencies Difficulty explaining Google sheets/drive how to use to photographers​​
Photographer	Not notified when QA provided feedback​
Quality assurance	not notified when new photos are submitted Submitted photos need to be copied to avoid further editing by creator Manual delivery of final content to clients on a daily basis
Finance	Manual verification of creator payment details and invoicing
Client	They can only send their shooting request by direct contacting project manager
Whole team	Multiple spreadsheets result in high volumes of unsynchronised data

Ideation

After all the researches and discussions. I mapped out the life cycle of a photo shooting job, drew multiple state machine diagrams of all the objects and how the stakeholders interact with them. By using the user story mapping, we try to investigate the needs of different stake holders. ​​Finally, I sort out the list of features/tools which might soothe the pain of my colleagues. I decided to design a platform which provide individual access to the database and provide the data and features they needed. ​​

The site plan for briefy

The major features

• Talent Scout
• Photographer
• Project Manager
• ​Quality Assurance
• Client

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• Overview unassigned jobs (knack)
• Assign jobs to photographers
• Overview the job data (knack)
• Overview the photographer data (knack)
• Tools for on-boarding signed photographers (knack)
• Automatic matching photographers to jobs by a matching algorithm between Photographer and Job

Talent scout feature - Overview of jobs which awaiting to assign

Feature - job pool, for matching photographers with jobs

Feature - Assigning job to photographer

• Overview all job data (knack)
• Application to the available jobs  (Job Pool features in knack)
• Report job situation (knack)
• A photos upload interface (wireframe)
• Instant communication tool with project manager (intercomm)

Feature - report the job situation

• Dashboard for monitor the progress of the project (knack)
• Overview all job data (knack)
• Overview all the photographer datas (knack)
• instant communication tool with project manager (intercomm)

• Display unapproved jobs and canceled jobs (knack)
• A tool for approving and comments the submitted photos  (wireframe)

• overview the on-goings jobs and delivered jobs​
• input new job request

Fast-moving business

Our clients have already ranged from small & medium size enterprise or marketplace in a short time. From company to company, their needs vary a lot. 

After further investigations and interviews, news agency & model agency hire photographers through internal connections. In general, they have enough photographers contact ready on hands. Which means, they never need us. 

For larger scale company, they might offer us more than one projects, different client project manager requires different individual access to their own project when my data structure was still remaining in single company login.

​For marketplace, due to the massive amount of jobs, they never input the job request one by one through a brief creator manually. They would give us a long spreadsheet for us for inputting instead. Also, they also request for a special naming method on the result photos or FTP storage solution. 

The brief creator

Consolidating quantity for bigger returns

TPhotographers would not take a single 80-euro-shooting job, but if we promise to provide them a large number of 80-euro-shooting job, they will do it. And they don’t fight for 80 euros jobs, but in an opposite way, we beg them! 80-euro-job could be a humiliation to photographers depends on the area. We have 2 ideas here, job package & job pool. Job package is a package which group up multiple Jobs into one, then we assign it to the photographer directly. Second, job pool is a board which allow the photographer get as many available jobs as possible. Turn out the job pool concept were adopted. 

Job Package

Job pool

Invoice complexity

I underestimate the complexity of the invoicing tool. Different countries with their own format, tax rate, different types of companies, Different type of photographers. The complexity is far away from expected.

Some type of invoices. Click for enlarge if you really want to.

Desktop vs mobile?

I was requested to design an mobile app for photographers from the very beginning. I even started to make wireframe and mockups on it. But I considered that photographer  shoot with DSLR camera, retouch the images and upload them through the desktop computer, photographers should use desktop to access the platform. Mobile which should not our first priority. But after all, once we launch the platform, we tracked the analytics that a lot of photographers use mobile to browse the site. What I learned from this, make decision by real figures. 

Some concept for the mobile application

Checklist to assist photographer shoot the right photos

Developers-free development

There was a long period of time that no development team in my company! Under the long struggling with the uncertainty of hiring process for a development team or out-sourcing, I found a web database solution called “knack”, which allow database building online without any coding knowing and developing the private (simple) web interface to access the data. After a few experiments, we decided to give a try since it could satisfy 70% of our need in terms of the features, developing time and budget consideration. 

knack

Proof of concept

Since the adaptation of knack, we already have 10,000 jobs records in the database and accessed by more the 700 photographers. The system is processing the 70% of the business flow. The solution replaced the old google sheet solution, 

Current status

Since the development team has expanded, we migrated the knack database into our own solution, remapping the workflow, automate the workflow as much as possible, develop the individual tools for the stakeholders for improving the efficiency. Also, we started to put more focus on refining the user experience to fit our internal user & external client better. 

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