The Communication Studio LLC
Sophisticated in-house Business Tool
Full range of UI services (10 mo.)

The commercial talent payment service bureau Broadcast Traffic and Residuals wanted to migrate their legacy mainframe-based system to a more "user friendly" windows and web-oriented interface.

Conceptual Design

Interaction Design

Online Help

Office Guidelines

BT&R's Talent Payment System processes the billing and payment of talent performers for both session work and residuals for broadcast commercials, music and other productions. Since necessary information is often received in an ad hoc manner and out of sequence, the Talent Payment System needs to allow BT&R to initiate the invoicing process flexibly, even when the available data is incomplete.

In this long term project, TCS was responsible for providing a broad range of design, usability, documentation and information architecture services to BT&R, including:

  • Conceptual Design
  • Software Operations Manual
  • Code Tables
  • Interaction Design
  • Windows/Web Data Dictionary
  • Online Help system
  • SourceSafe Structure and Usage Guidelines document
  • Office Operations documents

At right are some examples from my work at BT&R:

Conceptual Design
I'ts always important to capture the fundamental structure of the data, the workflow and the business processes up front, in a clear and easily understandable chart.

Interaction Design
The interface for this sophisticated business application need to be both comprehensive and easy to use.

Online Help
Interaction design goes a long way towards making the product usable, but you also need to have customer assistence that is easily accessible, appropriate, and interesting.

Office Guidelines
This simple "cheat sheet" accompanied a more comprehensive set of documents that helped systematize BTR's office operations.

Skills & Techniques : Visual Basic, Stylesheet & branding, "application-oriented" site, Robohelp, MS Word documentation, Erwin, SourceSafe, HTML, Visio, MS Office products

The challenge of this project was to create an integrated, easy-to-use set of data-entry and record management tools on an intranet that could be seamlessly migrated to the Web in a B2B environment.