We’ll be working on an artist facing dashboard for they web UI and would love to hear ideas about what you’d like to see in there. It should ideally be a page where the artists spends the majority of their time and where they go everytime they’d like to work on something.
Assigned tasks and corresponding deadlines are a no-brainer, but lets try to dream up a space that would be really useful.
Images, references, ideas, comparisons and anything that can help the conversation is very welcome.
I’d like to chime in aswell. I asked around the work floor what artists like and don’t like to see and came up with this. It contains a lot of ideas mentioned above.
A kanban style task status view where the artist can drag to set statuses. As well as launch the dcc’s with that task. The tasks could be sorted on due date, but also be set to a certain priority which would overrule the due date sorting. (ftrack currently does this nicely)
A task info area where it shows info about the selected task or in case of animation shots it could show a thumbnail strip of shots before and after (context). If nothing is selected it could show publishes made by others so that the artists also sees work of others.
Notes and comments from the selected task
Overall progress of all the work that the artists has
The interface could be in a ‘widget’ style so you can drag each block to where you would like and above a task bar with general info and personal settings. In a widget style system I can imagine extra and custom widgets could be made if needed.
Some additional notes while speaking with the artists:
Time tracking info should optional this tends to stress out certain artists
No info or optional info about tasks to come. This is not relevant to the current work of the artist it distracts them.
Yeah, I think sorting of tasks is an important one for artists. I would even say that having multiple sorting at the same time would be better. For example “I want to sort my tasks by first priority, then due date, then project”.
In Deadline this is called Scheduling Order; Job Scheduling — Deadline 10.1.23.6 documentation
I like being able to expose artists to what other people are doing around their shots/work. +1!
I’ve always thought that project management software, could easily gamify the workload, so this area could be the place for it.
This is very close to what I would love to see as an artist.
1+2 kanban with a nice sorting / filtering, maybe similar to github
Kanban should have few views, with less or more detail
Kanban should be able to show linked tasks with detail like last version published, artist name status, due date
3. The task notes, with robust way of subscribing to the other tasks/assets (prereguisities, next tasks)
4. Some kind of feed, where you can see the events. What is happening. Again, with solid filtering to project/sequence/people…
@Nielsm all said make sense and others also obviously agreed!
One thing which is great idea is the “Film strip” with preceding / following shots… if I can dream, I would love to be able as an artist to see my current reviewable edited inbetween those so I can check how they fit together…even if it would just be file que /playlist in the player (djv, RV player…) could be super handy for reviewing shot progress/changes.
Below is a view of how it could look with everything expanded/collapsed. We’ve tried to avoid “tab hell” by keeping important details always visible, whilst hidden details are only ever one click away.
I think the expansion of the Related Shots panel could become an extremely powerful tool that is really quick to open and close.
I’m not sure if this is part of the plan already, but I’m just trying to give my idea here:
Is it possible to add a timeline view where every artist’s daily schedule is made? Please have a look at the image for better understanding.
This helps the scheduling department plan their work schedules for artists in the studio
Yeah, I believe the artist should know about his timeline view for at least a couple of weeks to plan his work and match the deadlines of shots/seq/project accordingly. It’s essential, but I’m unsure if we can suffocate it here on this dashboard.
Something not mentioned, probably because we are still at the wireframe stage, but sorting of the kanban items (tasks) would be a good focus.
I’ve not seen multiple sorting working for kanban yet and with being able to see tasks from multiple projects, it would be good to sort by project as well as priority/due date.
This is a great point. Sorting will by “priority” “due date” etc is fairly easy but also sorting by “project” is a little more tricky. It feels like “sorting” by project is more “grouping” by project.
If you had three projects, how would you expect sorting by project to change the order of the items?
I’m thinking this might be a separate toggle button,“group by project” that maybe applies it globally to all lists, then each list has its own sorting on top of that.
Sorting by project would sort the kanban items project in alphabetical order, but how they are sorting within the project “group” is debatable. Could be alphabetical sorting of the items with the project sorting, but could also be by due date. This is where layered sorting would be good/flexible.
Yeah, I guess grouping could work. Maybe colour coding could also work.
Along the lines of what has already been said, relating to dates etc.
Some form of subtle colour highlighting on tasks which could reflect its priority and or its days until due?
Perhaps this could be an option that the artist could enable/disable, and set their own colours, but have a base default.
All would complement the promising-looking UI.
I would love to see some form of tagging or pinning for hero, key lookdev, or final shots/assets too. That would be a great way for an artist to always check the baseline for what they are trying to deliver,
