The goal of the Grid is to provide a universal and fast experience accessing media that is organised and using it in an affordable way to produce high-quality content.
Fragmentation of content over multiple systems hurts discoverability, consistency and overall visibility.
The Grid should work as the central repository for all media, accessible internationally via a modern web browser. Using the web as a medium also allows any screen to be shared with others using its URL.
It should be easy for other applications to integrate with the Grid, so that its contents can be used throughout the organisation. For consistency and maximal reuse, the key experience around media should happen inside the Grid and other services should remain loosely coupled.
At the same time, complex operations may be delegated to external tools or services that already work well. It should also be easy to source content from outside and bring it into the system.
To avoid competing parallel solutions, the Grid should support all content types and formats required.
- Adoption
- Use by other systems
- Number of other systems in use
Note: or "immediate", "instantaneous"?
Time is precious and expensive.
All user interactions should be almost instantaneous. That includes key operations like searching, uploading or cropping, but also all user journeys such as building up selections, making galleries, organising content, etc.
The Grid should maximise the time available to make editorial choices, rather than forcing users to constantly fight or wait on the tool.
While the baseline experience for all should be fast, power users should receive particular attention.
At the other end, exported assets should also be served to consumers quickly. This should not only be measured in terms of latency, but also minimal file size and optimal formats and dimensions for the device.
- Latency of upload, search, crop, etc
- Time to complete key user journeys:
- selection to gallery
- search to exported crop
- etc
The key to discoverability at scale is to keep the content organised, both on a manual and automated basis.
All grunt work should be performed automatically: ensuring metadata is clean, making content more findable, grouping and categorising by logical groups people rely on (e.g. topics, events), etc.
The Grid should also enhance production visibility as a default (e.g. usage, workflow).
With the mechanical work out of the way, editors can focus on high-value editorial curation of media, helping organise the content for the rest of the users. Powerful searching, browsing and filtering tools should be available to all.
Collaboration should be based on shared visibility rather than strict processes.
- Coverage of reported metadata to rights holders
- Frequency of image reuse
A great tool shouldn't have to come at a great cost.
The Grid should help organisations save money by embedding cost constraints within the editorial experience. Not only should clear cost information be visible at all times, but affordable alternatives should also be promoted where available.
Users should be trusted to make the right decisions and the interface should guide towards these. Access controls should be reduced to a minimum, while accounting of usage should be given high visibility.
Finally, the operational costs of running the Grid should also be optimised.
- Operational cost
- Copyright fees, e.g. misuse of expensive images
Top-quality content should be the default, not extra work in the process.
Generated assets should be optimised for best quality and fidelity on the targeted media (e.g. Web, mobile), regardless of the properties of the source asset.
Where other services may be consuming the exported assets (e.g. subsequent resizing and optimisation), files should be provided so as to maximise the quality of that output as well.
- Correctness of exported assets (e.g. colourspace, etc)
- Optimal file format and size of exported assets