Bulk Edit Metadata
My Role
Product Design Lead
Team
1 Product Manager
1 Designer
6 Developers
Company
Nuxeo
The Challenge
The lifecycle of a document begins with creation, then adding metadata so that it can be easily found. Often the same metadata needs to be applied to multiple files. Users could not do this in one action, and thus were repeating the same task hundreds of times. We were making this a frustrating experience for users.
Digital Asset Lost Context
In an ideal world, one where digital transformation has finally taken place a digital asset would never leave its business context. This would lower the need for storing standardized metadata content on the file itself. But most of the industries haven’t quite reached this stage yet and until then leveraging file metadata will still be of great interest.
Time Consuming Repetitive Tasks
The ability to edit metadata in bulk has been a customer request for years in our backlog, as it solved key use cases for our users to become more efficient and faster at applying metadata. However, because they were unable to do this in WebUI, we were forcing our users to spend a lot of time doing repetitive tasks and increasing the chances of committing mistakes during that repetition.
Editing Options
The central feature of this project was allowing the user to change the metadata of multiple files. We landed on three types of applying changes that fit within our scope: replace, append, and remove values. These supported different use cases, for example, changing a client's address on documents, removing an expiration date on assets, and adding models and products names of a photoshoot.
Error Feedback
To help the user recognize, diagnose and recover from errors, we planned for all the possible mistakes and situations that could happen.
Since each individual file may have fields that are required, on a schema level, we need to prevent the user from deleting information. On these fields, we disabled the option to clear any existing value.
Once a user starts typing on a field, the editing option switches automatically to replace the original value with the new one. If this field is cleared, the editing option defaults back to don't apply any change.
Turning hours of repetitive work into minutes.
Explore and Iterate
Research into competitors' bulk editing solutions revealed two main approaches: spreadsheet or form-based interfaces. I interviewed customers and their users to understand current obstacles and pain points, organizing findings through affinity mapping. This research informed a user flow that prioritized the most critical features for an MVP.
After initial sketches, customer feedback revealed that users needed more than simple bulk edits—they required the ability to add, remove, or replace values across multiple metadata fields. Through iterative design in Sketch, I refined a form-based solution, carefully balancing complex requirements with usability.
Bulk edit form and frameworks
Recognizing the need to simplify the flow and start with an MVP, I focused the MVP on the most urgent customer needs: keeping, removing, or replacing metadata values. The design prioritized scalability for future use cases while minimizing complexity to avoid overwhelming users.
Editing interactions
As part of the editing flow, we realized that our components were missing certain states and had other inconsistencies. Therefore, as part of this work, every state and interaction had to be accounted for and mapped to the other components styles and interactions used throughout WebUI.
Outcome
This was a very exciting and fun project for me to work on as it provides real value, involved a lot of research, and detailed interaction work. However, shifting priorities and changing roadmaps have delayed the launch of this feature. Still, I learned some important takeaways from this project related to product and business processes.
How to adapt to changing requirements
New timelines, resourcing issues, and reprioritization meant the scope of the project was constantly changing. I had to adapt to those changes and still deliver the best design in time with tight deadlines.
Always fight for good UX
I had to work under very strict technical constraints but, still, fight for what I believe is essential to having a good user experience.
Don’t overpromise and underdeliver
I learned how to define a true MVP vs. something that is simply not usable and therefore not shippable.
Choosing what we won’t do
There were many great use cases we could tackle with a rich feature set. However, every single one was costly or unrealistic. I had to determine where the real value was for WebUI so we did not spread ourselves too thin.