Unified VMS: From Legacy Systems to a Cohesive, Scalable Publishing Experience
ROLE: LEAD PRODUCT DESIGNER
CLIENT: MINUTE MEDIA
INDUSTRY: DIGITAL MEDIA & VIDEO TECHNOLOGY
YEAR: 2024-2025
MEDIUM: Enterprise SaaS Platform
SCOPE: Product Design, UX Strategy, System Migration, Design Systems, Information Architecture, Cross-Functional Collaboration, Stakeholder Management
Following Minute Media’s acquisition of STN Video, a key business objective was consolidating critical video management workflows from STN’s legacy Video Management System (VMS) into Voltax, Minute Media’s existing publishing platform.
The project involved migrating the tools and workflows publishers relied on to manage, organize, embed, and distribute video content, while ensuring the transition was as seamless as possible for existing users.
As Lead Product Designer, I led the UX and product design effort, working closely with engineering teams, stakeholders, and leadership across multiple countries to translate complex workflows from one platform into another. The challenge required balancing user needs, business requirements, technical constraints, and platform consistency while creating a more intuitive, scalable, and future-ready publishing experience.
The Challenge
This was far more than a visual redesign.
The STN VMS and Voltax platforms were built on fundamentally different systems, workflows, and assumptions. Many of the capabilities publishers relied on within STN either didn’t exist in Voltax or behaved differently, creating significant compatibility and usability challenges.
The project required preserving critical business functionality while adapting it to an entirely different product ecosystem.
Many solutions that worked well within STN could not simply be recreated within Voltax, requiring constant collaboration, iteration, and re-evaluation throughout the project.
Additional complexity came from:
Multiple stakeholder groups across Canada, the US, Europe, and IS
Evolving technical constraints throughout development
Competing business priorities
Legacy workflows deeply embedded in user behaviour
The requirement that new functionality align with Voltax’s existing design system and component library
Project Goals
The initiative focused on answering several key questions:
Competitive The Project Focused on Several Key Objectives:
Preserve critical STN publishing workflows
Minimize disruption for existing users
Align new functionality with the Voltax platform
Modernize the user experience
Support future feature expansion and iteration
DCreate a scalable foundation for long-term product growth
Which analytics tasks are users comfortable automating?
What concerns do users have around AI accuracy and reliability?
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What would increase user confidence in AI-assisted analytics workflows?
Collaboration
I worked closely with:
Engineering teams
Product managers
Executive stakeholders
Publishing specialists
Teams across North America, Europe, and Israel
Because the migration touched multiple products and business units, collaboration was critical throughout the project.
The project required constant communication, rapid problem-solving, and flexibility as requirements evolved and new technical challenges emerged.
Discovery & Analysis
Before proposing solutions, I conducted extensive workflow analysis to understand how publishers interacted with the existing STN VMS and identify which capabilities were essential to their daily work.
The research focused on:
Creating existing User Personas
Auditing existing workflows
Mapping feature parity requirements
Identifying gaps between platforms
Prioritizing business-critical functionality
Evaluating technical feasibility with engineering teams
One of the biggest challenges was balancing user needs against platform realities.
Rather than recreating the STN VMS one-for-one, I focused on designing solutions that felt native to Voltax while preserving the functionality publishers depended on.
This required ongoing collaboration with engineers, product leaders, and stakeholders to evaluate tradeoffs and adapt solutions as new technical constraints emerged.
Designing Within Constraints
The design approach emphasized:
Leveraging existing Voltax components whenever possible
Maintaining consistency across the platform
Simplifying complex workflows
Reducing cognitive load
Supporting discoverability and learnability
Building flexibility for future enhancements
One of the key workflows we examined was how publishers browsed and managed large video libraries.
Through interviews with existing STN users, we discovered that while the platform’s list view was familiar and efficient for scanning metadata, some users found the list view experience limiting when reviewing visual content. The small thumbnail previews made it difficult to quickly evaluate videos, often requiring additional clicks to verify content.
Rather than forcing users into a single workflow, I explored multiple approaches that balanced familiarity with improved usability. This included evaluating gallery views, list views, enhanced filtering, search improvements, content management workflows, and embed generation experiences.
The final solution introduced both gallery and list view options, giving users the flexibility to choose the experience that best supported their workflow. Existing STN users could continue working in a familiar list-based environment, while those who preferred larger visual previews could switch to a gallery view for faster content evaluation and discovery.
This approach improved usability without disrupting established workflows, while aligning the experience with the broader Voltax platform and creating a more flexible foundation for future enhancements.
Modernizing the Browse Videos Experience
The Outcome
The migration successfully brought critical STN video management functionality into the Voltax platform while creating a significantly more modern, streamlined, and scalable user experience. The solutions balanced familiarity for existing STN users with consistency across the broader Voltax ecosystem.
Furthermore, we identified legacy features and interactions that were no longer providing meaningful value to users. Rather than recreating the existing system feature-for-feature, we took the opportunity to streamline the experience by removing unnecessary complexity and focusing on the tools and workflows users relied on most.
Most importantly, the new experience was designed not only to meet current business needs, but to evolve alongside future product and user requirements while remaining flexible, maintainable, and easy to iterate upon.
To accommodate varying user needs, I explored and validated multiple approaches, including:
Options for both gallery and list views
Large video metadata modals with video preview
Search and filtering improvements
Content management workflows
Embed generation experiences
The final solution:
Preserved essential publishing workflows
Reduced reliance on legacy systems
Modernized the visual experience
Improved consistency across products
Minimized disruption for existing users
Eliminated redundant and low-value functionality that added unnecessary complexity
Simplified key workflows while maintaining business-critical capabilities
Created a foundation for future enhancements
Reflection
This project reinforced the importance of adaptability and collaboration when designing within complex enterprise ecosystems.
Rather than solving a single UX problem, the challenge was navigating competing priorities, evolving constraints, legacy workflows, technical limitations, and organizational goals simultaneously.
One of the biggest lessons was recognizing that successful migration projects are not about recreating the past—they’re about preserving what matters while building something better for the future.