Designed around the people who use it
We decide how people will operate a tool before we design its screens. It should be clear at every step, never require the same task twice, and finish in as few actions as possible.
Custom software case study
Name entry errors,
prevented by systems, not people.
A case from a video production company.
The company produced about 300 wedding videos a month. Each couple’s names were stored in a database that had been checked many times over. In the editing room, however, staff retyped those names by hand into the video editing software, working from printed work orders. As a result, typing errors and mix-ups between couples kept turning up in internal checks, and every correction took considerable time.
To solve this, we developed a system that encodes the names, the ceremony date, time and venue, and the package in a QR code. Scanning the code with the built-in camera of the editing Mac creates the editing project automatically from the template for that venue. With manual entry of names eliminated, name errors from that cause disappeared, and the time spent on corrections was reduced.
A wedding video is made once in a lifetime, and a misspelled name should never happen. In this case, finding and fixing errors had depended on people checking by eye; the system removed them at the point of entry.
Effort and risk of this kind are easily overlooked inside a company as simply “the usual way of doing things.” We review your operations from an objective, outside perspective and support the improvements.
- Videos produced per month, on average
- ~300
- Name errors caught in internal checks before the system
- Several / month
- Errors from the same cause since then
- 0
Working time saved (estimate at the time)
About 324 hours a year
Roughly two months of one person’s working time, or about $6,480 at around $20 an hour.
- Routine setup
- 5 minutes saved per video × about 300 videos a month = 25 hours a month
- 300 hours ($6,000)
- Fixing and rechecking errors
- 1 hour to correct and recheck × 2 cases a month
- 24 hours ($480)
Beyond the numbers, editors were also relieved of the stress of checking every name by hand.
How it worked
-
01
Work order
Names, date, venue and package are encoded in a QR code printed on the work order
-
02
Scan
The editor opens the software on the Mac and scans the code with the built-in camera
-
03
Automatic setup
The timeline is created from the venue’s template and the project is named
-
04
No manual entry
Names are never typed; they are always available to copy and paste
Further improvements at the same company
- Importing footage was also automated. Inserting a card copied the files under unique names and backed them up to a set location.
- After working hours, computers saved open work and shut down automatically, which also reduced electricity use overnight.