• Stakeholder Interviews: We spoke with content producers, IT administrators, and marketing teams to map existing workflows, pain points, and “wish‑list” features.
• Competitive Analysis: We benchmarked leading CMS platforms to understand best practices in dashboard design, metadata schema, and ingestion speed.
• Technical Audit: We evaluated Cantiz’s backend stack, network constraints, and security requirements to ensure seamless integration with existing systems.

1. Define Clear Objectives

• Create an at‑a‑glance dashboard that surfaces key metrics and recent uploads.
• Simplify navigation so even non‑technical users can find, tag, and schedule videos in three clicks or fewer.
• Introduce rich, customizable metadata fields (genre, rights, geo‑restrictions) for precise content discovery.
• Optimize the ingest workflow to support batch uploading, transcoding, and automatic quality checks.
• Implement granular user roles and permissions to safeguard content and streamline approval processes.

2. Prioritize Incremental Delivery

• Break the project into sprints: MVP dashboard and ingest pipeline, then metadata and user management, followed by advanced scheduling.
• Incorporate user feedback at each milestone to validate feature design and identify high‑impact refinements.

1. Wireframing & Prototyping

• Sketched low‑fidelity wireframes for the dashboard and content library; refined clickable prototypes in AdobeXD.
• Iterated on navigation patterns (side menu vs. top bar) based on click‑through tests.

2. UI Components & Modular Architecture

• Developed a library of reusable components for cards, tables, and form elements—ensuring consistency and speeding up design and development.
• Designed metadata forms as dynamic, schema‑driven modules so new fields could be added without code changes.

3. Usability Testing

• Conducted remote sessions with 10 content owners to validate ease of tagging, uploading, and scheduling.
• Collected qualitative feedback and measured task completion times to drive successive refinements.

Iterative Design Process

• Continual user feedback loops empower teams to catch issues early and deliver features that truly matter.

Modular, Scalable Architecture

• Designing UI components and data schemas as decoupled modules prepares the CMS to evolve with future needs.

Rigorous Usability Testing

• Validating designs with real users uncovers hidden pain points and ensures the final product feels intuitive.

By centering the project on user needs, modular design, and continuous testing, the Cantiz CMS emerged as a powerful, secure, and user‑friendly platform. Content owners now enjoy a single, streamlined interface for managing, tagging, and distributing video content—accelerating workflows, tightening security, and setting the stage for future growth and new features.