Cloud / Desktop

Amazon Nimble Studio

Nimble Collective was founded by animation industry veterans from Pixar and DreamWorks to empower small and medium sized animation and VFX studios by facilitating remote content creation in the cloud.
Nimble Collective was acquired by Amazon in 2019.

Role - UX Manager

What I Did  - Prior to the Amazon acquisition I was responsible for the creation all UI / UX for the Nimble Studio platform. The simplicity of the UX was cited as one of the leading factors in the acquisition.
Post-acquisition, I recruited and led a team of 6 UX designers working on on cloud-based animation and VFX creation, as well as cloud rendering of animated feature films.

Impact - The resdesign of Nimble Studio is currently in progress. The innovations made led to a position on Amazon's Design Leadership Board - and I was a speaker at Amazon's annual Conflux Design Conference in 2021 & 2022.

Simple setup allows non-tech savvy IT Admin to setup Nimble Studio and its associated applications

Nimble Studio integrates a web-based render farm job monitor and cost management system

Integrated cost and usage management provide producers and studio heads with real-time render cost and usage analysis

Engineering specs and redlines

Amazon Nimble Cloud Studio End-to-End Flow

1. Sign in to the artist portal via SSO                 2. Choose a remote machine type                     3. Launch a streaming session

4. Log in to the remote desktop                          5. Create animated content                                6. Start a render job in the cloud

Presentation Strategy

Our cloud rendering service is set up and deployed from the AWS Console. As such, it utilizes the AWS CloudScape Design System. But while CloudScape is designed for the tech-savvy cloud engineers, our service caters to non-tech savvy artists, producers, and IT Admin not necessarily familiar in cloud architecture.
My team not only needed to stretch the boundaries of the CloudScape Design System, but convince the UX review team to allow deviations from the rigorous CloudScape standards.
To accomplish these goals, a presentaion was crafted that integrated user feedback directly into the UX Review presentaions. This won praise from the review team for its unique approach to communicating outside-the-box thinking.

 Users don't read the copy....            So utilize entertaining videos          Cognitive overload....                      So hide optional settings

Ayla Networks

Ayla Network's Agile Mobile Application Platform facilitates the quick and easy development of mobile applications for controlling and monitoring internet-connected devices.

Role - This was the only designer among a staff of approx 200 engineers. 

Challenge - All Ayla customer documention was in the form of Word docs that had to be emailed to customers individually.

What I Did - Create an interactive web-based documention site that could be easily updated and maintained.

Impact - Significant reduction in calls to the customer service team