Case Study How I helped an Established Business Innovate & Unify Their Suite of Products in a Single Cloud Based Solution

  • Position

    Lead Product Designer

  • Expertise

    Design, Interaction, Planning, Research

  • Platform

    Web, Responsive

  • Interested?

    Visit Schilling

Schilling Schilling Schilling

Grow Your Business With Professional Publishing Software

Schilling is a Danish company and a leading provider in the Nordic region of specialised software solutions for publishers. Since 1980, they are helping publishers in the Nordic countries and beyond achieve strategic goals, increase sales, and open new revenue streams.

As a Product Designer working for Schilling on their publishing software gave me an invaluable opportunity to help publishers of audio, digital, and print content organize, shape, and streamline every step of their publishing workflow.

UX Discovery Workshop to Kick Things Off

Up until I started working for Schilling, I wasn’t familiar with the nuts and bolts of the publishing business, and since Schilling was a company with a long tradition in the Nordics, my decision was to start our cooperation by visiting their offices in Copenhagen for a few days, meet everyone and hold a UX Discovery Workshop. They had already been working with other designers, but weren't really happy with the results, so it was important to get things on the right path.

During the workshops I conducted group and individual interviews with all the key people involved in the project, client representatives, held presentation sessions, asked about future plans, did tons of brainstorming and most importantly, got to know the people I would work with.



This gave me much needed information about how things work behind the scenes and, at the same time, it meant a great opportunity to understand their business model. It was crucial that we were be able to cover the entire process within the application: contracts, payments, publications, contributors, etc. and have all the accounting math behind it. It was clear to everyone that it would be pretty complex math.

Break Down Requirements & Create a Modular System

The goal was to design an app that would help independent publishers organize and conduct their work in an easy and streamlined way. It was also going to provide a deep level of customization for each client, because there were so many variables in how money circled around.

We supported a flexible modular system that could be used individually, but at the same time as a fully integrated solution. Put into perspective looks like this:

Asset management
Register, track and validate all your assets and view all available rights – simply

Rights management
Easily manage all your contracts and rights re: acquisitions, own utilisation and sales to foreign partners

Royalty management
Save time and reduce costs while handling even complex agreements automatically and accurately

Author portal
Improve and manage your author and agent relations with a self-service solution that saves time and money

Publishing lifecycle management
Give every department easy access to all the info about a project, from idea to publication to reorder

Create an Effective Design System

After all the research, planning & preparation was done I started working on the UI, building all necessary components, ranging from simple form elements to overview charts.They covered all the possible states so that the front-end team could easily follow and implement.

Cooperation with the development team was another very important part: very often I was the person to explain the reasoning behind a specific flow or element and make adjustments when necessary. Sometimes you need to rethink a UI solution to make sure the dev team doesn't spend a lot of time on non-crucial work.

Publishing Leaders Depend on Schilling

Schilling's customers are among the largest and healthiest publishing houses in the Nordic countries and beyond for decades.

The end goal was to enable publishers of various content organize easily and in detail every step of the publishing workflow, so that publishing businesses work faster and more efficiently to harvest greater profits and user engagement. After all, what a better way to make them thrive and grow.