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Redesigning a Complex System — a UX Case Study

Designing digital products is always challenging, but designing a complex system is another level of difficulty.

Samantha Da Silveira
The Startup
Published in
13 min readMar 11, 2020
Bird’s eye view of a round stone labyrinth.
Photo by Victor Garcia on Unsplash

I had the opportunity to lead the redesign of a major company solution called MediaCMS, which centralises the management of all of BCE’s customer media content.

For the past 10 years, the product has had to adapt to different market demands while retaining the base product. This situation led to the creation of a very complex system, difficult to maintain and develop.

So what exactly is a complex system, you may be asking? Well, in the case of MediaCMS, it is a digital product with many interdependencies, aimed at many different types of users with numerous systems relying on one another to work in harmony. MediaCMS centralises content management, work and distribution in one tool. Customers can place their orders into the system; these are then managed and tracked, and finally, those same customers are then invoiced, all through the MediaCMS.

For the redesign, there was a lot to take into consideration regarding harmonisation between the systems and the users.

What is the company, and what does it do?

The company in question is BCE — Broadcasting Center Europe, which is part of the RTL Group in Luxembourg. Broadcasting Center Europe (BCE) is a European leader in media services, system integration and software development in the areas of television, radio, production and postproduction, telecommunication and IT.

The MediaCMS is mainly used by BCE’s Digital Media Operations, which are a complete set of services to digitalise, enrich, store, transcode, edit and distribute your content.

The digital media operations provided by BCE through the MediaCMS.
The digital media operations provided by BCE through the MediaCMS

Who finally decided that this tool needed a redesign? Why only now?

With the relocation of the company to its new premises and the evolution of its workflow and technology towards…

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Samantha Da Silveira
The Startup

Experience designer based in Luxembourg. Curious about everyday problems and how to resolve them. https://www.samanthadasilveira.com/