Unified Channel Manager

Maintaining economy of concepts for users

I utilised first principles thinking to reduce all existing channel concepts to just three categories — owned channels, paid channels and public channels, in line with media industry nomenclature. This system is future-proof and can account for broadcast, print and any other channel types we may have to support in the future.

Channel connections

I designed a new channel connection flow that accounted for all 3 channel types: owned, paid and public channels. This was perhaps the biggest win for our customers from this project.

Revising the Owned Channel flow (seen above) allowed us to fix an issue customers had been complaining about for years — channel disconnections. We did this by introducing support for partially-connected channels that only required access for specific use-cases (see step 1 above); rather than being in a binary (and rather annoying) connected or disconnected state.

Details details …

Each channel now got its own detail screen that summarized key information, user access, status and other linked channels such as ad accounts.

I introduced subtle tweaks and improvements to the overall experience to help guide novice admins through Channel Manager and reduce their anxiety about “breaking” something.

Channel groups

I reconciled the two existing channel grouping mechanisms (channel groups and brands) by expanding channel groups functionality to account for brand requirements.

Dashboard

Finally, I designed a dashboard for users of Channel Manager to land on and get an overview of all channels in their org. Any issues with channels anywhere across Brandwatch leads to this interface, with options for resolution. Each affected channel is now associated with its user-corresponding social profile which enables bulk resolution.