During discovery for another project (see Wizards Asset Manager), my colleague and I noticed a major bottleneck in WIP workflows between art directors and artists. Art directors explained how Wizards' use of Hasbro’s encrypted file-sharing tool ("BLAST!") was too cumbersome for artists and caused communication breakdowns over long, error-prone email chains. Deeper inquiry revealed a labor intensive process:
For context, Wizards commissions over 6,000 pieces of art yearly across Magic: The Gathering (MTG) and Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), costing 40 people hours per week in uploads alone. Imaging techs were reassigned just to keep pace. So, I asked: "Are we solving the right problem?" The answer was no — we needed a better workflow before a new asset manager..
From the start, I anchored the work to clear design philosophies based on distilled research finding from user interviews, business goals, UX best practices. These were then vetted by stakeholders, the product owner, and engineering for by in. Those philosophies are:
*These principles also guided the broader Wizard Asset Manager.
Next were personas. Time constraints due to the mid product pivot led me to create two personas:
Through interviews with six art directors and three artists, I built personas with real goals, frustrations, and motivations, helping me stay user-focused rather than designer-biased.
Using the Gonzalo persona, I helped the product owner draft the requirements (reqs) doc and contributed to the initial flow diagrams. These artifacts outlined critical functions/pages for the Artist Portal and kept the dev team aligned on deliverables.
Next, I developed a mood board with these parameters to keep the visual design grounded:
I sourced inspiration from Behance, Dribbble, and other design sites. This guided visual direction through critiques and iterations.
Armed with philosophies, reqs, flows, and mood board, I began sketching the Dashboard. It needed to organize Gonzalo’s art commissions under their Purchase Orders (POs) with:
I involved developers and stakeholders early to get their ideas on functionality and early takes on the feasibility of the designs.
I designed a dark-mode dashboard to reduce eye strain and better showcase art, using a blue/green/gray color scheme to distinguish Sketch/Final/Complete statuses.
Each critique session involved:
Early critiques focused on sharpening the visual style and reducing the contrast of the notification box. I iterated accordingly — replacing circular corners with square ones and adjusting header prominence.
At each milestone, I ran approvals with UX designers, developers, the project owner, and stakeholders to keep the project on track and create a sense of shared ownership. This also allowed me to gather need information for the hand-off like specific annotations or call outs that would be needed.
This helped developers empathize with users, give key feedback, and improved implementation success.
Next, I designed the Art Details Page. It needed to organize Gonzalo’s art commissions details under their for each specific piece of art including:
Each critique session involved:
Despite approvals, planning meetings, and the many conversations we have, sometimes things just get by or need to change. In this case, we learned developers were building a single-page site, not the multipage system originally envisioned. I adapted by designing a T-shaped layout (using a sliding structure) and created a short GIF to explain it. After team alignment, we moved forward.
Unlike the dashboard’s colorful alerts, the Details page needed muted UI elements so uploaded art would dominate the visual focus, ensuring artists could verify details without distraction. With this in mind I gave the art ~2/3 of the screen real estate and confined the metadata to the rest. Three UI versions with shifted layouts were created and critiqued using user stories again.
Main points of critique were to
As with the dashboard, I provided screens, annotated callouts, Jira ticket links, and design rationales for dev handoff, ensuring full understanding and easier development.
As with the dashboard, I provided screens, annotated callouts, Jira ticket links, and design rationales for dev handoff, ensuring full understanding and easier development.
This project was successful and met the goals it set out to hit. It was able to
However, due to organizational inertia and heavy workloads, adoption stalled. As of April 2022, the Artist Portal saw little use, as fear of disrupting entrenched workflows prevented broader rollout. The project was sunset despite its technical success.