Film and video production is a difficult and complicated business. Productions of all sizes — independent, corporate, or broadcast — require that producers build a team, find equipment, locations, and other resources, and create and execute a plan that will turn their script into a successful production. Achieving this success requires serious project management skills, and, increasingly, serious tools for managing these productions.

ProductionNext provided film and video producers with an integrated set of tools for scheduling, budgeting, and otherwise planning their productions. These tools were built as a fundamentally collaborative, cloud-based system: Producers could add other ProductionNext members to their projects, and give them access to the parts of the projects that match their responsibilities. The tools shared a common database, so that changes in one area automatically led to corresponding changes throughout the system.

From 2016 to 2020, ProductionNext provided these services to almost 1000 producers. As combined CEO/CTO, I was responsible for the company's strategy, operation, and engineering, and designed and implemented all the ProductionNext software.

A national telecom provider came to us overwhelmed by the complexity of their everyday work. Their customer service group of over 2,000 employees is responsible for a broad range of information-intensive tasks. We worked with the client to prepare a set of websites, each of which was targeted to a particular aspect of their needs. We provided a complete range of services to the client, including an ethnographic approach to collecting user requirements; design of appropriate site architectures; visual design and branding; site design, implementation, and deployment across the company's collection of servers; back-end and database design and development; and usability testing to evaluate the quality of the sites.

I worked with a local high school to build an online presence for their student-run newspaper. This project posed the usual challenges of information design and trying to get a easily navigable architecture for the many different kinds of content to be featured on the site. However, the main challenge was to build it in a way that the content of the site could be successfully managed by a large number of high school students — creating and editing stories, moving them through the editorial process, attaching photos and videos to them, and classifying them into the appropriate parts of the site. Drupal was a useful tool for this project, but it was only a framework — the real challenge, as in any interaction design project — was getting the tools to properly match the expectations and needs of their users.

The media arts program of a local high school came to us to build an showcase site for their new media arts program and the student-run video magazine produced by the students in that program. This project had some similarities with the previous journalism project, but demanded a much more detailed staff area, one that the magazine's staff could use to develop the content of an issue from a set of simple ideas for stories, through the selection and editorial process, to a complete and published issue of the magazine. Thus, the staff tools incorporated implict and explicit workflow features to support the students and faculty in the development of an issue of the magazine. The site also needed to offer strong support for the video content of the site — not just for the visitors to the site, but again on the staff site, reaching out to the complex set of video servers and live video streaming devices that were at the heart of the media program.