Ekoo: Digital Asset Management System
Reimagine remote 3D art production.
Ekoo Digital Asset Management System is a cloud-based solution developed specifically for game art production. It is based on the needs of game content production and collaboration teams online.
Ekoo connects all data together, helping teams to produce high-standard digital assets in a more efficient and visualized manner.
Academic Project
Nov - Dec 2021
Timeline
6 weeks
Key practices
Other contributors
Haoran Xu, Duoning Zheng, Cynthia Lee
01 Background
Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, remote work has become the new normal in the gaming industry. This shift has posed unprecedented challenges, especially for content creation teams centered around 3D art. Although collaboration tools like Jira, Trello, and Google Docs are widely available, they fall short when it comes to handling large resource files, coordinating across complex roles, and supporting real-time review and feedback loops.
02 Research & Insights
Design Hypothesis
Hypothesis 1: The pandemic accelerated the demand for remote collaboration, but traditional tools fail to support the highly specialized workflows of art production.
Hypothesis 2: Existing tools (such as Google Docs and Jira) face critical limitations in handling large file sizes and providing effective visual project management.
Semi-structured user interviews (20+ participants)
Objective: To gain a deep understanding of the real obstacles faced by target users in their actual workflows — rather than just addressing surface-level issues.
Interview Participants:
20+ art professionals from the gaming industry, including 2D/3D artists, animators, project managers, and technical artists.
Participants come from companies such as Blizzard, Activision, Tencent TiMi, NetEase Leihuo, and Ubisoft.
Interview Question Design:
Workflow Mapping
Example: “Can you walk me through every step from receiving a task to delivering it?”Tool Usage
Example: “What tools do you typically use for collaboration? What limitations have you encountered?”Collaboration & Communication
Example: “How does your team share and review art assets? How efficient is the communication?”Pain Point Retrospective
Example: “What caused the last major bottleneck or slowdown in your collaboration process?”
Affinity Mapping
I tagged the issues, behaviors, and emotions mentioned in the interviews, and extracted over 300 high-frequency excerpts in total.
Using a two-dimensional scoring method based on Impact and Frequency, I identified and prioritized 4 key high-priority problems:
🎭
Role Misalignment and Communication Breakdown
Artists, directors, and PMs have clear roles, but complex communication chains lead to information loss.
🔗
Fragmented Cross-Tool Workflows
Multiple tools (Google Drive, WeTransfer, WeChat, Jira) result in disjointed processes and scattered information.
⏱
Delayed Asset Feedback
Feedback is often slow or misaligned with 3D production practices due to unclear task statuses.
🌀
Chaotic Version Control
File naming is inconsistent, overwriting happens frequently, and there’s often no clear “final” version.
The challenges brought by multiple roles, multiple tools, and multiple formats are not just about “poor collaboration,” but rather a misalignment in information architecture.
We realized that the solution lies in restructuring the underlying system of information organization and feedback mechanisms — simply optimizing a single interface cannot resolve these systemic collaboration barriers.
Competitor Research
We conducted a week of competitive analysis to determine the strengths and weaknesses of similar products. The most direct competitor was Arthub (Level 1) and indirect competitors were products such as Arcweave, Jira and Google Docs (Level 2, Level 3, and Level 4).
For these competitors, we compared 4 main aspects: target audience, first impressions, functionality, and user experience. Opinions were obtained from user interviews as well as market research.
📒
Level 1 Products with the same core services and users.
Level 2 Products with the same core users. These products do not provide our core functions and services. Relevant functions and services may be added through upgrades/updates.
Level 3 Products with different target groups but similar functions and services.
Level 4 Products with the same core target users but aim to meet different needs. They are not likely to become our competition.
Data Synthesis and Behavior Model Building
More importantly, Competing products in the market fail to satisfy our users because the pain points of heterogeneous users are simply not being attended to.
"While the designers want the functionality to build on their existing habits, the team leaders focused on getting the job done on time and with quality."
👨🎨
For 3D art team members
the solution should build on their existing work habits and context to address emerging 3D annotation and collaboration issues.
📊
For art lead or design managers
the solution should facilitate progress tracking and should increase team productivity.
✍️
For concept design and copy base members
the solution should be more intuitive to help them organize and find different versions of the draft.
03 Testing and iterations
Sketch & Wireframes
After getting the basic insights, we conducted a round of sketch brainstorming for in-depth interviews and user process testing.
However, the feedback we got from users was not ideal, our users basically mentioned that this version, while taking into account their current needs and pain points, was overall not very different from other software they were using.
Considering the learning costs associated with using new software, they would not be willing to use our product and would rather be stuck in the previous product.
‘Trouble shooting’
Based on the feedbacks, we thought the problem might be in some detailed UX considerations. We decided to do another round of competitive analysis to focus on understanding the Usability Performance of different features through user usability evaluation and interviews.
Usability Performance Chart
User testing based on low-fi
We invited 5 key users to participate in our user testing, and insights supported our final decision.
What should we improve based on the testing:
🎨
Customization
The different roles of users influence their preferences and this experience tells them how to arrange their document screens.
🧼
Reduce Friction
Due to the complexity of the game production digital assets, the user experience of finding information needs to be optimized.
🧭
Orientation & Legibility
In an environment of high information density, orientation can suffer, leading to high cognitive load and frequent moments of refocussing.
⚖️
Reduce Conflicts
While doing user testing we found that when art directors or others were conducting design review sessions they wanted to be able to manipulate 3D assets, but this could lead to software conflicts.
04 Design Solution Based on Insights
Progress tracking System
Highly personalized dashboard that displays tasks and content based on the user's responsibilities.
Visualized documentation (GDD)
Visualized file system designed to quickly find the right file and feedback to process.
Color Coded Task Management
By using color coding, users can quickly and easily identify tasks that require attention, track progress, and prioritize work based on urgency or importance.
Easy to use annotations designed for different habits
Draw
An intuitive and quick annotation tool but in low-fidelity.
Serve for both synchronous and asynchronous annotation.
Comment
A detailed annotation method especially friendly to non-drawing experts such as project managers and writers.
Serve for both synchronous and asynchronous annotation.
Skeleton System
A precise and professional annotation method but could be time-consuming.
Serve for both synchronous and asynchronous annotation.
05 What I learned
Context is significant to define.
Context is the starting point when creating visualization. During design We need to ask ourselves questions such as “ who, what, when, how” in order to decide our context. The team can also decide the feature and experience according to context.
Not letting your anticipation limit your ideas.
Sometimes we are used to using an expected answer when we get a question. In this project, I enjoyed the process of overviewing the app’s functional part and listening to the users’ experience, their stories, and being an active listener.
It helps me understand the user’s pain better. It’s normal if we are not standing in the same position and we could not easily feel the same way as our target users.
