Logo Caption

How do you manage thousands of digital assets when no one can find what they need?

At a retail company, teams struggled to locate and manage digital assets efficiently.

I worked with a team to research the key issues and developed recommendations for optimizing the system to make finding, managing, and approving digital assets seamless. 

Product
OpenClose
Type of Project
OpenClose
Role/Team
OpenClose

Challenge

A retail company’s Digital Asset Management (DAM) system was meant to streamline content organization and retrieval, but instead, it had become a source of frustration. Searching for assets felt like finding a needle in a haystack - cluttered metadata, inconsistent tagging, and outdated workflows left teams wasting valuable time trying to locate the right files.

Beyond search inefficiencies, users lacked visibility into digital rights, often unsure if assets were approved for use, leading to compliance risks and mismanagement. Manual approval workflows further slowed the process, creating bottlenecks across teams.

Recognizing these challenges, I worked alongside the team to analyze key pain points, conduct user research, and develop strategic recommendations that would transform the DAM system into a more intuitive, efficient, and scalable tool.

Discovery Sessions & Requirements Gathering

Our Research Approach

Research Methods Used:

To deeply understand the pain points and inefficiencies, we structured our research into three key methodologies:

Collective Intelligence
Workshops

We brought together users from various departments in a collaborative Miro workshop to eliminate silos and gain a cross-functional understanding of how the system was used across teams.

💡 My Role:

  • Encouraged participation to ensure all voices were heard
  • Facilitated open discussions to surface user frustrations and workflow breakdowns
  • Recorded and synthesized insights to identify recurring themes

Stakeholder
Interviews

Building on workshop findings, we conducted in-depth interviews with key stakeholders from different departments to uncover department-specific challenges and priorities.

💡 My Role:

  • Developed a targeted list of questions to dive deeper into workflow pain points
  • Co-led interviews alongside a senior consultant to extract technical and business-related insights
  • Mapped out workflow inefficiencies to inform solution development

Surveys & Data
Analysis

Recognizing that some users might be hesitant to speak openly in workshops, I developed a conditional survey that allowed users to provide anonymous, structured feedback about their experiences.

💡 My Role:

  • Designed a targeted survey to address specific technical pain points raised in the workshops
  • Ensured questions adapted based on user responses to capture detailed, role-specific insights
  • Synthesized findings to identify major trends and validation points for our recommendations
📊 Key Research Insights

1. Search Inefficiency & Metadata Gaps
📌 76% of users reported difficulty finding assets due to metadata inconsistencies and a lack of advanced search filters

  • Users struggled to find assets quickly due to inconsistent metadata and lack of structured search filters
  • Search results were often irrelevant or incomplete, making retrieval inefficient
  • Metadata fields were not standardized across teams, leading to confusion and redundancy

2. Digital Rights Management (DRM) Uncertainty
📌 68% of users expressed uncertainty about asset licensing and usage rights

  • Rights metadata was scattered across different platforms (spreadsheets, emails, SharePoint), making it difficult to verify asset usage permissions
  • There was no automated system for tracking asset licensing and expirations, increasing compliance risks
  • Users lacked a clear workflow for requesting and approving rights extensions

3. Manual & Disjointed Approval Workflows
📌 54% of users said the manual approval process caused significant delays in content publishing

  • Rights extension requests and asset approvals were handled manually through emails, creating bottlenecks.
  • No centralized approval tracking system existed, causing confusion over pending requests
  • Users had no visibility into the approval pipeline, leading to miscommunication and delays

4. Usability & Adoption Challenges
📌 61% of users found the DAM system difficult to navigate and were unsure of best practices

  • The interface was unintuitive, making it difficult for users to navigate the system effectively
  • Many users were not trained on how to optimize search filters or metadata tagging
  • There was no structured onboarding process for new users, affecting adoption rates

Developing Our Recommendations

After gathering and synthesizing user insights, we analyzed the gaps and inefficiencies in the system. Since I was unfamiliar with the DAM platform, I:

  • Conducted a deep dive into the software’s technical documentation to understand its full capabilities
  • Initiated conversations with the DAM platform’s tech team to clarify system limitations and untapped features
  • Researched best practices in DAM optimization used by industry leaders to ensure our recommendations provided maximum value

Based on our findings, we proposed four key solutions to improve search functionality, digital rights management, and workflow automation

Final Recomendations

Search & Metadata Optimization
  • Standardized metadata fields to ensure consistency across all departments
  • Advanced search filters (by campaign, asset type, rights status, and expiration date) to improve search accuracy
  • Updated keyword indexing to make asset discovery more relevant and efficient

📌 Expected Impact: If implemented, these changes would reduce asset search time by 30% and improve metadata consistency across teams

Example Final Recommendation Deck - Sanitized, Modified, and Condensed 

Final Takeways

This project reinforced how user research, metadata governance, and process automation can significantly improve digital asset management efficiency. While we provided strategic recommendations, successful implementation would require:

  • Stakeholder alignment to enforce metadata and search standards
  • A phased implementation roadmap for automation and UI enhancements
  • User engagement initiatives to improve adoption and long-term system efficiency

Love what you see?

Please feel free to reach out!

linkedin.com/in/dagoye
deborahagoye@gmail.com