Discovery

Producers from each brand demonstrated their workflow regarding setting cast information in-depth while we screenrecorded the session.

Use cases of each brand

• Syfy: Cast and character created separately, and each makes a reference to a series, even though the actual association is made in the season level. Since a cast member is tied to a specific series, they create multiple instances of an actor who appears in two or more different series.

• Bravo: Cast and role are set under season level. They only create cast members, and the information about a character in a scripted show is entered in the cast node. Roles are chosen from a dropdown; since most of Bravo's shows are reality shows, the role is usually "Self".

• USA: There is only a Person type, which represents a character. Within the Person, there are fields to enter actor information as well as the series it is related to. If the actor information changes, they have to search for all the Person nodes played by the actor and replace the information one by one.

We took notes while rewatching the recordings and created workflow diagrams for each brand to compare and contrast the workflows easily. Then, we identified the pain points to be solved for each brand as the following.

Major pain points for each brand

• Syfy: Confusing and redundant workflow. Multiple nodes per one actor appearing in multiple series, making it difficult to know which one to use without looking at the ID number.
• Bravo: No separate character information node or field.
• USA: No separate actor node, makes it difficult to edit actor information at once.