Epiphan Connect
Create professional live-streaming events with participants from Microsoft Teams and Zoom
Epiphan Connect allows video producers to grab audio and video from any participant in a Microsoft Teams or Zoom meeting and send them to any live-streaming production tool in order to produce professional live-streaming events.
Company and Date
Epiphan Video | Jun 2022 — Dec 2022
Epiphan Video | Jun 2022 — Dec 2022
My Role
Product Design | Workshop Facilitation | UX Research | Design Lead
Product Design | Workshop Facilitation | UX Research | Design Lead
How might we help video producers use audio and video from Zoom, Google Hangouts or Microsoft Teams to produce professional live shows?
Problem and context
Due to Covid, video producers of live-streaming events had to find new remote ways to produce virtual events. Even though not appropriate for this scenario, these professionals started using group chat tools like Zoom, Google Hangouts and Microsoft Teams to achieve their goals.
However, these tools were not customizable enough to fit their needs: it wasn't possible to add titling, logos, animations, video playback, and so on. Therefore, professionals started creating hacks to fulfill this need.
These hacks are risky, expensive, and add an extra layer of stress into an already stressful situation.
Business goals:
Improve video producers’ journey.
Reduce stress by creating a tool that replaces several hacks in their workflow.
Show our tool is reliable and trustworthy for big events.
Some Epiphan users deal with high-risk events like the Emmys and sports drafts. It's a great business opportunity if these users can trust our tool to deliver these events.
Improve the value of current Epiphan tools.
Make it easier to combine a new tool with the current tools with the goal of offering an end-to-end solution.
Reduce stress by creating a tool that replaces several hacks in their workflow.
Show our tool is reliable and trustworthy for big events.
Some Epiphan users deal with high-risk events like the Emmys and sports drafts. It's a great business opportunity if these users can trust our tool to deliver these events.
Improve the value of current Epiphan tools.
Make it easier to combine a new tool with the current tools with the goal of offering an end-to-end solution.
The result:
Design of a new product called Epiphan Connect aimed at video producers and meeting participants using Zoom and Microsoft Teams.
Users find the application easy to use, highly valuable and revolutionary, even changing their whole workflow to adapt to it.
Epiphan developed close partnerships with Microsoft and Zoom.
The product is slowly creating new steady revenue.
The Approach
1.
Understanding users and the product
The product managers already had some research and feedback indicating that this was a problem worth solving with no competitors sharing this market.
We had personas separated by technical expertise.
Video Producers:
Goal: Produce a live event with the minimal amount of risk and set-up time possible.
Technical level 3: Understands the high complexities of video streaming and production, being able to hack solutions when needed.
Meeting Presenters:
Goal: Feel comfortable and deliver a professional-looking live presentation without having to learn how live stream software works.
Technical level 1: Understands the basics of Microsoft Teams or Zoom, but has little knowledge of video production.
Two of three main Personas
How producers are currently solving this problem
The Pin Farms hack:
One of the most common ways users are hacking solutions for this is to have a single computer per meeting participant.
Each computer would have a participant “pinned” on its screen and send the audio/video signals through cables to the video production computer.
On the video production computer, the video producer then would combine all signals into layouts, add titling, graphics and advanced features and then live stream the meeting.
The product definition needed some work
Different stakeholders were telling me different ideas and goals for the product. To save time and align the team, I lead a workshop session.
This 3h long workshop session defined the basics of what the product benefit hypothesis was, what the long-term goals were, basic features, and product constraints:
• It wouldn't be a full production app: it won't edit, record or stream video. It would only work with Microsoft Teams for the first release.
• We already had a solution that was in the works by the developers and engineers based on an existing product, so this project didn't feature an ideation step.
We moved quickly by using Miro's boards as the source of truth for the initial stages of this project
Remote post-up workshop in Miro to gather insights on product characteristics
Epiphan Connect will replace one of the steps of the video producers' workflow
Understanding the flow of events of the interface and the back-end
This project involved three different apps (Epiphan Connect + Microsoft Teams/Zoom + Video Production Software), so we had to make sure we understood their relationships and limitations.
2.
Prototypes and concept tests
With the help of more UX designers, we were able to quickly put a visual prototype together so we could start testing it with potential users and collect feedback. I was conducting the research and delivering feedback while another UX Designer was working on the visual design.
Figma prototype showing the flow of connection to a meeting and setting up your video feeds
We tested our prototype with users that matched our Video Producer persona.
I also collected information on how users' current workflow was, so we could confirm some assumptions.
Research presentation slide: these themes were constant in all my interviews with potential users.
Research takeaways:
Video producers found the tool useful and easy.
They are usually not bound by a single tool: they use the best tools for the project they have to execute. They are also looking for an end-to-end video-producing solution.
Video producers will not use this tool if the event presenters' experience is not good.
The event presenters, that will be using Microsoft Teams or Zoom, are interacting with the audience and are usually less tech-savvy and more prone to be confused by the setup.
This persona was not the main priority for the stakeholders. However, after this research, I was able to convince the team to prioritize important features for these people.
I researched users that had done a live event with our new tool. They were either producers of a live show or presenters of the show. These new insights helped us plan for the future.
The product and marketing team also talked and did demos of various versions of our product to potential users from around the world. Insights were gathered and passed onto the team in regular meetings.
First-time users would have a difficult experience
Another part of my research was to understand what would make people shy away from our product. After my initial interviews with users and conversations with the team, I wrote a document touching on critical friction points. The friction affected the experience, brand equity, and revenue.
We gathered more evidence of these issues after the product was released and we fixed them within the first months.
We used this report to improve users' first-time experience after the product was launched.
We kept iterating the interface, testing it ourselves in our staging environment and gathering feedback.
The team was also in touch with Microsoft and Zoom to finalize the application, understand the commercial details, and security rules.
I was constantly in touch with the QA and engineering team to better write UI text for error states, progress bars, modals and tooltips.
The product pages are relatively simple. What made this a complex project was the number of states, errors and technical information we had to understand in order to design.
Users had to pair their Microsoft organizations with our tool via a wizard, so we had to find strategies to make this as effortless as possible.
We had to cover a lot of different system states.
Example of what a typical page in Figma looked like. Most of the UI development was modals, states, and reactions to user inputs.
We had to design elements that would appear in other apps
Here's an example of when Epiphan Connect is active during a Microsoft Teams call:
On the left: Epiphan Connect running a "test" meeting. On the right, the same "test" meeting seen in Microsoft Teams (with only one participant, me).
Different states such as 1) connecting live preview 2) preparing live preview 3) no live preview.
Marketing materials
The marketing team also created marketing materials pre-launch.
3.
We launched it six months after I joined the project
Epiphan also got a lot of media and praise from Microsoft and Zoom as proof of the amount of interest this tool generates.
We had a lot of interest in our launch event: 2600 people.
This was a record for Epiphan and it showed how important Epiphan Connect is, as webinars have an average of 200 participants.
Results
• The tool successfully replaced hacks in video producer processes for virtual events hosted with Microsoft Teams and Zoom.
• Features added post-launch made it easier to use Epiphan Connect with other Epiphan tools users were used to, getting closer to an end-to-end solution for video production and streaming.
• Epiphan developed close partnerships and got plenty of media exposition with Microsoft and Zoom.
• Current users find the application highly valuable and revolutionary. People that used to travel for work could change their whole work setup as this tool allowed them to work remotely.
• More time and testing are required to understand if video producers would trust this tool for high-risk video production.
Next steps
There's a list of features and tests we still need to execute and prioritize to reach our business goals, such as:
• Improving the onboarding process and adding helpful tips for interface discovery.
• Keep reviewing and understanding the revenue and usage of this app and its effects on the business model.
• Understanding what we need to do to make this tool more trustworthy for big events.
• Keep working on an end-to-end solution by merging Epiphan Connect with other digital and physical applications from Epiphan to provide users with a single major tool for remote video production and streaming.
____________________
Credits:
Admin: Misha Jiline, Mike Sandler, Nic Milani.
Product Management: Yusupha Touray.
UX Design: Marcos Duda, Alexander Tanaev, Maria Sankina.
Engineering: Vadim Kalinskiy, Damián Cherubini, Angel Verdu, Ivan Matskan, Roman Davydov, Adam Frame, Oleg Nogin.
Marketing, animations and branding: George Birchall, Dan Wallace, Marta Chernova, Jay Bonilla, Julian Fernandez, Victor Doubrovine.
Customer Success: George Herbert, Mathieu Renaud, Zack Bell, Adam Palmer, Ryan Haynes.
QA: Issam Kndakji, Loulia Massarani, Grygoriy Bezshaposhnikov.
+ The whole team at Epiphan Video