When I joined Ownzones in 2015, Paramount was still shipping feature films to its distribution partners on physical hard drives via courier. We replaced that with a cloud dashboard. This is the short version of how the operator-facing side of that platform got designed.
Ownzones Connect — a cloud admin platform for film and TV studios (Paramount, Sony, Warner Bros, MGM) to manage and deliver video content — replaced a workflow built around FedEx envelopes and HDDs with one browser-based dashboard. Separately, the consumer VOD app I designed in the same period was featured by Apple TV and Roku TV for three months in 2015 for its interaction design.
In 2015, high-resolution video files were large enough, and internet infrastructure was unreliable enough, that the dominant way major film studios delivered content to distribution partners was still physical: a hard drive, boxed, shipped by overnight courier, signed for on the other end. Post-production houses did the same in reverse. Every step of this pipeline had a human doing something that software could do — tracking which drive was where, which version of a film was on it, whether encoding parameters matched the destination’s specs.
Ownzones was building the cloud-native replacement. I joined as the company’s first UX hire, which meant establishing the design function from zero alongside designing two products in parallel: Connect, the operator-facing admin platform used by studios and post-houses, and the consumer VOD app running on iOS, Android, Apple TV, and Roku TV.
First UX designer on a cross-functional team working with high-profile studio clients. On Connect, the work was synthesis: translate the messy, half-offline workflows that studio operators actually ran into a clean interface that made those workflows continuous and visible. That meant deep time with the engineering team to understand the transcoding and delivery architecture — the backend was the UX — and sustained stakeholder conversations to surface what the current physical process was actually doing.
In the same period I also built the company’s internal UX process (milestones, documentation, handoff), mentored junior designers, and designed the consumer VOD app across web, mobile, and the two major TV platforms.
1. Design the dashboard around the job, not around the system. The engineering architecture of a cloud transcoder is a tree of jobs, parameters, output profiles, and delivery endpoints. The mental model of a studio operator is simpler: I have a file, I need this partner to receive it in the right format by this deadline. Early explorations of Connect started from the system side — because the system was the source of truth and the engineering team thought in those shapes. The interface that shipped started from the operator’s job: one file, one destination, one deadline, surfaced in sequence. The job view was the default; the system view was one click away for the engineers and power users who wanted it.
2. Earn the persuasion round trip. Iteration — calls, focus groups, workshops, wireframes, rework — was the baseline I held the team to, and it did not come naturally to the client or to parts of our own team. The studios we worked with were used to waterfall deliveries. Design reviews felt slow to an engineering team shipping transcoder performance. The persuasion happened one feature at a time, and the quality of what shipped was the argument. That discipline — defending iteration to senior, time-pressured stakeholders without losing momentum — is the single habit I carry from Ownzones into every complex B2B project since.
Connect went to production used by Paramount, Sony, Warner Bros, MGM, and other post-production teams to manage and deliver video content through the cloud. The Ownzones consumer VOD app shipped on web, iOS, Android, Apple TV, and Roku TV — and was featured by Apple TV and Roku TV for three months in 2015 for its interaction design. I built the internal UX process (documented milestones, transparency with business and stakeholders) that the design team used after I left.
Operator tools that replace physical processes have a specific honesty to them: you can point at the old process, count its friction, and design against the count. The lesson I keep is that the best operator UX is frequently not in the features you add but in the steps you remove — every step that used to require a human signature, a phone call, or a signed-for box is a step whose disappearance is its own kind of delight for the person who used to have to do it.