How to Manage Visual Assets for Better UX
Can Using DAM Solutions Help Enterprises Develop an Optimized User Experience?
Web workers are often unaware of how the choices they make regarding user experience (UX) really impact consumers, but also, how they impact others within their agency or enterprise.
There are, of course, many considerations to make, but few are as important to the user's experience as that of the consistency of creative assets. Let's take a closer look how by optimizing the management of virtual assets the result can be a much improved user experience.
The management of virtual/digital assets (including images, videos, and nearly everything else) is important for a variety of reasons. Images that are too large for example can inflate page sizes and the time they take to load (not to mention that the wrong ones can potentially dissuade users from converting) and videos that aren't compressed properly not only provide a poor user experience, but can dramatically inflate bandwidth consumption and that means a bigger hosting/cloud bill at the end of the month. Neither of these will do.
Fortunately, digital asset management (DAM) offers an effective solution for organizing, storing and retrieving rich media and managing digital rights and permissions. These centralized digital libraries provides employees, clients, contractors and any other key stakeholders controlled access to digital assets - including images, photos, creative files, video, audio, presentations, documents and more.
Even though DAM is tailored toward creative workflows, document management and video management are an indispensable aspect of DAM. Marketing teams often implement a DAM system, but businesses can utilize DAM across all departments.
How Is This Currently Used Within Enterprises?
Anyone looking to optimize current digital asset workflows needs a DAM system. From startups to massive global brands, every business (and every department within it as you will see below) can potentially benefit from implementing a digital asset management offering.
Digital marketers, for example, can create marketing materials with dynamic templates and easily distribute them to various departments and offices around the world, which can be repurposed and modified for regional variations (such as language). Designers can also be heavy users of DAM as hey can optimize their creative workflows, searching and discovering files with ease (instead of constantly recreating images, creatives can save time and resources by just redeveloping assets. These are just two possible uses - there are many others.
The Essential Features of DAM
The needs of each enterprise will differ obviously but there are some key features that today's DAM solution should provide. Those cited as of the greatest importance include some form of approval process control, asset sharing, cataloging/categorization, collaboration, image editing, meta data management, online proofing, social sharing, usage tracking and analytics, version control and watermarking. If you're a user of DAM solutions (of even if you're actively exploring their use) share what feature you believe are most important with a comment below.
What Solutions Are Available
DAM solutions are increasingly important to enterprises and there are numerous providers on the market looking to support their initiatives. Some of the most popular today include Canto, CELUM, WebDam, IntelligenceBank, Shotfarm, Widen, Nuxeo, Brandfolder and Percolate among others (Adobe and SAP, for instance, have DAM-like features built-in).
The user experience is getting a great deal of attention these days and it is the responsibility of everyone within an enterprise to ensure that experience is consistent and of the highest quality. DAM solutions are quickly becoming a foundational element of this and it benefits enterprises greatly to consider their use.
