STARZ Design Systems
STARZ has about 600 employees at multiple locations across the US. In addition to employing a team of designers and developers for upkeep of the official STARZ mobile app, they also employ a team to update and maintain their own internal applications - proprietary software that allows STARZ to manage or automate tasks like content procurement, quality assurance, licensing, and editing.
As the lead UX Designer for the Internal Applications team, I worked with product owners and developers to design, build, and maintain 5 separate applications for STARZ internal use.
When I arrived, applications were developer-driven and UIs were inconsistent. To keep our user’s experience consistent, I created and implemented a design system in Figma, complete with design tokens, and a night mode theme for future applications.
Application Design & Development
When I was hired at STARZ in 2021, I was the first and only UX designer on the STARZ internal application team, and the application production process was driven by developers. My first challenge was to sell the UX process to our development team and application users, to get them onboard with longer discovery and research cycles, and to introduce them to the concept of low-fidelity wireframes and prototypes as a way to solve problems before they get to development.
We used Figma for collaborative research, white-boarding, and prototyping, documented our work using Confluence, and managed our sprints and tickets using Jira.
Apple Live Feed
Apple Live Feed was a dashboard that STARZ employees used manage content sent to AppleTV. When the UX team was given this project, the workflow was completely manual,
Curator
The content licensing teams at STARZ had built their own system of complicated Excel sheets and macros to solve their data management problem. Our UX team dug deep into the workflows they had built for themselves and develop an innovative and intuitive UI that increased efficiency and cross-department collaboration.
Partner Overrides
Night Mode
When the STARZ Quality Review team asked us to update their primary UI, they had a very specific requirement: their team worked in darkened studio booths, watching content for 8 hours a day, and they preferred a dark UI when working.
When I joined the team, the internal tools design system was a bootstrapped template, based lightly on Google’s “Material Design”. Unfortunately, it was built only in light mode.
Once we understood our user’s dark mode requirement, we made a decision to rebuild our design system, from scratch, and add a “Night Mode” for use in all future internal applications.
Design System
In early 2023, Figma released new features allowing for better management of design tokens. Design tokens are groups of data that represent design decisions - color, spacing, font-size, line-width - and can be repeatedly used within a design system. Establishing rules in the form of tokens not only made our design experience easier, but since we were now able to export those rules into code snippets, it made our development experience easier as well. I used those tokens to integrate our Figma-based design system into our developers existing stylesheets, making our code and designs perfectly representative of each other.
