Case Study 05 / 06 · Jellysmack · 6 months
JellyStudio — Unified
Production Platform
Designing a production platform for creators at scale: bringing content management, publishing workflows, team collaboration, and performance analytics into one coherent experience, and reducing the fragmentation that had kept creators and internal teams from working efficiently.
My Role
Design Lead: information architecture, end-to-end UX, user research, interaction design
Team
Design, Engineering, Product
Timeline
6 months
Scope
Full platform: project management, content library, publishing flows, onboarding, analytics, and team collaboration
Creators were managing entire media businesses across a dozen disconnected tools.
JellyStudio is Jellysmack's internal production platform: the workspace where creators, editors, and internal teams coordinate content production, manage publishing calendars, track performance, and collaborate across a complex distribution network. Before JellyStudio, that work happened across a patchwork of spreadsheets, messaging apps, shared drives, and legacy tools that didn't talk to each other.
The brief was clear: design a unified platform that would bring all of that work into a single, coherent experience. The challenge was doing it without oversimplifying. The work being done here is genuinely complex, and the people doing it are professionals who don't benefit from systems that hide complexity behind friendliness.
Understanding the workflows before designing the interfaces.
We began with structured user research: interviews with creators, editors, and internal team leads to map out the actual workflows the platform needed to support. These sessions surfaced the real complexity: content production at Jellysmack spans multiple platforms (TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitch), multiple team types (creators, editors, platform specialists, account managers), and multiple time horizons (daily publishing decisions alongside longer-term catalog strategy).
User research sessions: mapping real workflows before designing the interfaces.
Card sorting helped us understand how different user types mentally organized their work, which informed the platform's information architecture and navigation model. Creators thought in terms of projects and content; internal teams thought in terms of schedules and performance.
Card sorting: understanding how different user types mentally organize content and workflows.
Production User Journey
Designing the platform layer by layer.
Wireframes & Structural Design
With research in hand, we moved into structural design: wireframes that established the platform's core navigation, content models, and interaction patterns before investing in visual refinement. This phase was collaborative: weekly reviews with engineering leads ensured that architectural decisions were feasible, and sessions with stakeholders kept the design grounded in real use cases.
Early wireframes: establishing structure and navigation before committing to visual design.
Onboarding & Getting Started
Onboarding was a high-stakes surface. Creators and internal team members needed to connect their social accounts (TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, YouTube) and understand the platform's value proposition before they'd invest time in setup. We designed an onboarding flow that was direct and transparent: showing what the platform could do and why connecting each account mattered, before asking users to do the work of connecting.
Onboarding: showing value first, then asking for setup. Connecting social platforms made visual and purposeful.
Onboarding Screens
Full onboarding sequence: a step-by-step walkthrough designed to minimize friction and maximize first-session value.
Projects & Content Library
Projects were the organizing unit of the platform, where creators grouped content, managed assets, and tracked production progress. The projects list needed to handle both breadth (users managing dozens of active projects) and depth (each project containing a rich hierarchy of content, assets, and metadata).
Projects list: designed for users managing a large, active portfolio of content productions.
Asset management: project assets with rich metadata and detail views for managing content at every stage of production.
Channel & Post Management
Channels were the distribution layer, where content was scheduled, published, and tracked across platforms. Channel detail views gave teams visibility into what was live, what was scheduled, and how recent content was performing, all in one place. Post detail and publish flows were designed to make the metadata-heavy process of publishing across multiple platforms as fast and error-resistant as possible.
Channel detail: visibility into live, scheduled, and recent content: with performance context alongside publishing tools.
Post detail and publish: managing rich metadata and cross-platform publishing without the complexity bleeding through to the surface.
Creator Profiles & Performance
Creator profiles gave teams a consolidated view of each creator's catalog, performance data, and account status, enabling account managers and platform specialists to make informed decisions without switching between tools. The performance dashboard surfaced the metrics that mattered: views, engagement rate, and sentiment, with enough context to act on what the numbers were showing.
Creator profiles and performance dashboard: 1,493 total views, 12.41% engagement rate, 92.31% positive sentiment: actionable data presented with clarity.
A shared foundation for how Jellysmack serves creators at scale.
Key Results
↓
Reduced fragmentation across production tools — one platform replacing multiple disconnected workflows
↑
Increased clarity for internal teams managing creator accounts at scale
↑
Faster publishing workflows through unified channel management and metadata tooling
1
Shared platform established as the operational foundation for Jellysmack's creator network
Design for the power user earlier in the process.
JellyStudio's users are professionals, people doing complex, high-volume work every day. Early in the project, we spent more time than needed on simplification for onboarding cases when the real value was in making expert workflows faster. I'd shift the research emphasis earlier toward the power user scenarios: the editor managing 40 pieces of content per week, the account manager handling 20 creator relationships simultaneously.
I'd also push harder for analytics instrumentation at launch. We had a strong qualitative signal from research but limited quantitative data on which surfaces and flows were actually driving value. Getting that feedback loop in place from day one would have let us iterate faster and with more confidence.