Overview
I led a team of 3 to come up with a design that enable INKR content partners to effectively manage their inventory of titles to be published to INKR Comics app with INKR CMS.
INKR is a new comic platform that is committed to diversity and accessibility. It provides an end-to-end solution which enables any title to reach its intended audience, while also helping it to realize it potential earnings.
One of its offering is INKR Publishing – a suite of tools and services for comic localization & distribution that, including INKR CMS and INKR Localize. Both are built on top of our foundational AI & Data technologies, such as Comic Recommendation Engine, Comic Vision Engine and Commic Index & Analytics Engine…
Roles and Responsibility
- Lead a team of 3 designers
- Concepts and ideation
- Information Architecture
- Enterprise UI/UX
Defining the Problems
In order to achieve true diversity of content, eventually INKR needs to have a lot of titles in its system. Once the acquisition process is over, the next challenge with this is dealing with the onboarding process of these titles into the system and managing them. It involves a lot of file handling, data entry and inventory management.
File Handling
Receiving, processing, and uploading terabytes of data in multiple formats from different publishers around the world.
Data Entry
Input rich metadata for each title so that it can be discovered and presented to the reader.
Inventory Mgmt.
Organizing and monitoring each and every title in the catalog.
With an inefficient system such as the one we are having currently, it will cause a significant bottleneck in the onboarding process of every new title, extending the time it takes to be published, and delaying all other titles in the pipeline. Ultimately, it will take forever to scale to thousands of titles, and results in our inability to achieve a truly diverse catalog.
Proposed Solution
We’ve come to the conclusion that the most scalable way is to provide:
Online Self-Service Portal
That any partner can use on their own to package, publish and monetize their content, with a user-friendly interface.
Robust, Secure, Data-rich
Tools and features that help publishers make sense of their catalog no matter how large.
That’s why we built INKR CMS – our online portal which provides a free and easy-to-use set of online tools to our partners, helping them package, publish and monetize their content with the INKR Comics app.
Dislaimer
Due to NDA agreement, I cannot show the design of the interface. Below is an overview of the features I worked on for INKR CMS.
Organizational Features
Every partner has their own dedicated space on CMS called organization, where they can manage their contracts, taxes & agreements, users, etc… Titles created within an organization instantly inherit the default sharing settings of the org, saving time and effort dealing with permission controls.
Catalog Management
Whether our partner has a few titles or hundreds of them, they can be managed easily on CMS. There are 2 viewing modes to choose from: a list mode with the book covers and simple filtering, or a denser inventory mode with advanced filtering functionalities.
Title Information
Clear and simple methods to enter and edit title info and metadata, to let readers know what the titles are all about.
Title Assets
Easy ways to edit and preview visual assets to ensure that titles are beautifully packaged for all devices.
Title Publishing
Robust ways to control a title’s availability and the monetization of each chapter.
Title Collaborators
Add and remove permissions for individual organization members.
Title Reporting
Transparent reporting on title and catalog performance.
Chapter Viewer
Support all reading styles right in the browser.
Page Editor
Full-blown image editing capabilities.
Advanced Features
Safe Area Editor & Focus Area Editor, powered by INKR Vision.
Reporting & Payment
Daily sales reports with detailed breakdown, monthly revenue reports.
Automatic invoicing, global payments and taxes.
Outcome & Lessons
INKR CMS is being used extensively by both our internal team members and external partners. We’re continually adding new features and improvements to it to cater for the ever-increasing needs that a content parters can have from managing a comic catalog.