Disney Debut Backstage

Project Name: Debut Backstage - Redesign of “Felix” (Internal Screening Tool)
Team: Disney Studio Technology Division
Audience/Users: Internal Video Engineering & Marketing Teams

Overview

The transformation of 'Felix,' an essential but previously inefficient studio tool, into 'Debut Backstage' marked a significant improvement in media file management and event planning operations for Disney+. The initiative aimed to streamline the pre-screening process by designing a unified internal platform. The redesign in Figma was driven by feedback from internal stakeholders, ensuring the platform met their needs and improved efficiency.

ACL: consists of a list of banners, event types, and approval sources
Audience: a person or group of people invited to an event to view presentations
Banners: A Production Studio (e.g. Marvel, Hulu)
Entitlement (Presentation): combination of video, audio, subtitles, metadata, images.
Event: a screening that is created for the audience to view a presentation or collection
FP: acronym for Film Presentation
GSS: acronym for Global Screening System
Playback count: an assigned number of views for a presentation
SP: acronym for Special Presentation
FP: acronym for Film Presentation

*For confidentiality compliance, I’m only showing the main application screens.

Problem Statement

Before its redesign, Disney's Felix Management Tool suffered from a fragmented workflow and multiple UX issues, significantly impacting studio operations. Event producers had to navigate multiple platforms, using Google Sheets for metadata management, Monday.com for tracking events, and Felix for configuring user groups for events.

This disjointed and manual process was error-prone, causing delays and inefficiencies in media file management and event planning, and severely hampered operational productivity. The tool's rigidity also hindered the rapid adaptability required in dynamic event management.

Project Goals

The MVP for Debut Backstage was designed to consolidate functions into a single, streamlined platform, enhancing productivity and user engagement for media management and event planning. Drawing on extensive stakeholder feedback, the user-centric approach aimed to create a scalable system that improves studio operations and user experience. Its main goals included reducing the number of tools for event creation, automating workflows for greater efficiency, and facilitating smoother communication and management.

Minimize the assortment of tools required for event creation.
Automate workflows to improve efficiency.
Facilitate smoother communication and management tasks.

My Role

As the Concept Product Designer in Disney's Studio Technology Division, I spearheaded the transformation of 'Felix' into 'Debut Backstage,' a streamlined and efficient tool for Disney+. I also updated the Studio Design Library in Figma to better support these changes.

Process

Through regular meetings with stakeholders, we refined our strategy and prioritized key features, accelerating the concept-to-design process. The project's rapid pace required tight collaboration across teams to align our design and technical efforts with our goals, ensuring successful implementation as well as supporting Disney’s stringent brand standards, effectively resolving the product’s key deficiencies.

My Design Approach

I inherited this project from another design team ands had to work with previous inbound from UXR. My strategy was to align with best practices as outlined by Google’s Material Design System (GMD) and IBM’s Carbon Design System (Carbon) standards, to enhance usability through strategic use of logo and layout colors.

For Debut’s Application Screens, I redesigned using adaptable components from the Disney Studio Design Library. This update introduced efficient tabs, accordions, and large modals to improve event and content management. Additionally, I refined the visual aesthetics by adopting a minimalist blue color palette and a monochromatic blue-gradient logo, significantly boosting brand coherence and recognition.

1 - Modals & Dialogs

After auditing Felix for design patterns and problems, I determined that tasks like event creation, audience addition, and event code management are most effectively managed through modals. Carbon's focus on modals for essential workflows and Material's emphasis on context-specific dialogs shaped my strategy, minimizing user disruption during critical operations.

Considering the complexity of the tasks, I adopted a large modal format that uses Carbon’s responsive framework and GMD’s adaptive sizing, delivering clear display of large format content. This approach optimizes both user experience and workflow efficiency.

Event Creation Flow - Large Format Modal

2 - Layout & Color Explorations

In designing the Debut Backstage platform, I chose a clean, structured layout with tabs organizing files by status—New, Pending, Error, Completed, All Files—to enhance navigation and usability. Several design iterations of color schemes were explored.

The team approved the design featuring a monochromatic blue color palette and cohesive visual theme for its simplicity and clarity.

I ran quick internal research and found that placing the system status indicators next to titles enhances visibility and creates a contextual relationship with the file names. This helps users in quickly understanding the system status as they scan from left to right.

3 - Debut Logo Color Explorations
I explored a variety of color treatments to update the original black and white Debut Backstage Logo. After careful consideration, the team chose a logo with clean lines and a simple, monochromatic color palette that scales across different sizes and platforms, enhancing brand recognition and a minimalistic design.

Consolidating a Fragmented Workflow

Event producers faced a cumbersome workflow, handling tasks across multiple tools. I designed the Debut Backstage platform to integrate event and content management into one cohesive system. Now the Event & Content Planning Modules streamline event details, scheduling, audience management, and communication, while also simplifying content handling with upload, editing, and distribution tools. The intuitive UI/UX of both modules simplifies workflows, boosts productivity, and eases content and event management.

Before - Felix

After - Debut Backstage Home

Event Planning Module

I led the redesign of the Event Creation Flow and Event Details Page, targeting significant usability issues to improve user experience and workflow efficiency. An audit of the event creation flow within Felix revealed significant usability challenges, primarily due to limited functionalities that complicate content management as well as the lack of an Event Details Page, where details of an event could be modified and managed (e.g Audience Management), ensuring a comprehensive and tailored event management system.

These issues include…

Limited Editing Capabilities: Users are unable to view or edit crucial details about events, including dates, once they are created
Inefficient Email and Entitlement Management: The platform lacks functionality for adding bulk emails and entitlements efficiently
Complicated Interface: The search functionality is confusing, requiring unnecessary navigation steps, and is redundantly placed within the groups tab
Muddled Audience Types: Users cannot differentiate between types of users
Restrictions on Event Management: Users can’t duplicate events or edit details on the Entitlement Group Details Page
Post-Creation Restrictions: There are significant limitations on modifying Access Control Lists, IDs, and names of Entitlement Groups after they have been established.

1 - Event Creation Flow

2 - Events Module Home

Debut Backstage - Event Planning - Events Home

3 - Event Detail Page

Debut Backstage - Event Planning - Event Details Page

Content Planning Module

Following product specifications, I re-designed the Content Planning Module of Felix for the Debut Backstage platform, streamlining Disney content managers' ability to enter and manage episode metadata. This re-design enables efficient file management, displaying filenames, types, and tags, with capabilities for editing and scheduling, facilitating a smooth episode preparation and screening workflow.

Debut Backstage - Content Planning - Home

Debut Backstage - Content Planning - Presentation Details

Conclusion

The Debut Backstage project successfully transformed the Felix Management Tool into an efficient, user-centric platform for Disney’s media file management and event planning needs. The redesign tackled critical workflow fragmentation and UX limitations by leveraging modal research and stakeholder feedback.

After shipping the new design, internal tech support cases related to Debut Backstage declined by 11% over the next quarter.*

This enhanced both operational efficiency and user engagement, marking a significant advancement in Disney's Studio Technology Division.

*Data for subsequent quarters not available