SSIMWAVE – Ryan Whillier

I had the great privilege of working at SSIMWAVE with a highly intelligent and motivated team. SSIMWAVE is the brains behind the video delivery industry, and it turns out video has a long trip from the camera all the way to the TV in your living room.

SSIMWAVE has a family of software applications and services that help ensure video quality across the delivery chain, all built on the award-winning SSIMPLUS algorithm. Producers can rest assured that their artistic intentions are preserved, video companies can optimize their delivery workflows and make sure everything is working in top shape, and viewers can enjoy the best video quality wherever they are watching. SSIMPLUS is an Emmy-award winning algorithm that can see like the human eye, and generate a viewer score between 0 and 100 to give users a qualitative measure of how their video is performing. There are various applications of this algorithm that come to life in a family of products called Live Monitor, VOD Monitor, Ad Monitor, and Insights.

“Embrace the complexity, value simplicity.”

It is very technical and challenges a designer to embrace the complexity and strive to keep things simple. I joined SSIMWAVE in 2018 as their first dedicated UX designer. They had previously outsourced the work, but decided to bring the discipline in-house. I was tasked with initiating the practice and working to create a culture of design alongside the engineering and product team as they built out new products and features.

2018-2020

ssimwave.com

Roles

Lead UX Designer
Graphic Designer
User researcher

Work

Web application UI design
UX support for four applications and their engineering teams
Print and web design for marketing initiatives

This was my first foray into a straight software company, and each new challenge presented a wealth of learning opportunities. Knowing the team didn’t have a formal in-house design process, I had a few goals as I started out:

Build trust

My first and most important goal was to build trust with the team. They had been doing things a certain way so far, and I wanted to come alongside to help improve things together.

Serve the team

I wasn't at SSIMWAVE to be the expert that knows more than everyone else and now everything should be done my way, I was there to amplify the existing efforts of the engineering and product teams. Software engineers, Product Managers, and QA are the heroes—I was there to build upon their efforts.

Defend users

Get to know SSIMWAVE's users and be their advocate during the design process.

Allow work to show its value

It didn’t make sense to uproot everything. Design should showcase its value through the inherent value it brings to the process.

Educate

Good design is based on good principles. It’s not arbitrary. Teaching good design and explaining design choices can only improve the work of a great team and help foster a culture of design.

Watch and learn

It was a great challenge. During my second week at SSIMWAVE, my lead was out at a tradeshow, I had no idea how the teams functioned, who did what, and how to get involved. So, I watched and learned. I noticed teams would gather around someone’s machine and hash out UI solutions on the fly and then leave the front-end developer to execute. The next time I saw a gathering, I creeped into the back row and listened. Over the next few days, I asked the occasional question, and took notes with simple sketches of the decisions being made. That way there was at least a record of what was discussed and we wouldn’t have to rehash at the next gathering.

SSIMWAVE team hard at work solving problems

Outcomes

As a user-centered design approach showed its value, I was invited to daily stand-ups and began working with the teams to pre-think and work out features before they starting building them. To be honest, we were designing and building at the same time—not the most efficient, but a great place to start. Teamed up alongside engineers, researchers, and product owners, we were able to quickly come up with great solutions. You can see my design process here, but we always started with the why, and followed that up with low-fi wireframes, and then progressed to hi-fi visual designs and prototypes with documentation. I worked that first 6 months building trust and getting ahead of the development cycle to allow enough time to explore and test features before it was time to build. By the end of my tenure, UX was a key part of the process in almost all features the team was working on. I continued to present a design perspective and the value of good user experience on the overall SSIMWAVE brand experience.

Work

UX at SSIMWAVE included supporting the strategy and UI design for four products, future UI/UX design strategy, and marketing design initiatives. Live and VOD Monitor are SSIWAVE’s flagship products.

Learn more about my work on each product below.

UX Strategy & Design System

The product experience ecosystem is as important as the products themselves. The more consistency between products, the better the overall experience.

As I looked at the portfolio of SSIMWAVE products, it was clear they would benefit from a design system and component library. This would improve design, development, and QA times and give a boost to the brand by providing a consistent experience across the board. The initiative consisted of a full inventory of software components, visual design exploration (desktop and mobile), and code framework evaluation and selection.

Ad Monitor is the close cousin of Live Monitor and is geared towards monitoring the quality of ad break playout.

It’s a different use case than Live Monitor, a different set of users, and another great challenge in terms of maintaining consistency while considering variations in the product line.

Tools: Sketch, InVision

Insights showcases the power of SSIMWAVE quality measurement and allows customers to build custom data stories that meet their unique needs.

It is built on a brand new architecture and requires a different way of thinking about the way information is presented. It was one of those career challenges where you really have to wrap your head around the language and conventions of the UI to be able to maximize the experience you are proposing for users.

Tools: Balsamiq, Sketch, InVision

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Marketing

While working on the UX needs of the company I’m also on the marketing team, and handle various marketing initiatives along the way.

Brochures, one-pagers, email designs, banners, booths, customer prototypes/demos, and website management.

Tools: Sketch, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator