Fine-tuning Dolby Labs' Customer Portal to meet the precision standards of their high-tech customers.

Dolby Labs customers felt neglected so Dolby called on Primacy to rethink and redesign their customer portal.

  • CMS
  • Consumer
  • Creative
  • Experience
  • Ingeniux
  • Intranet & Portals

The Challenge

Dolby’s customer portal was out of tune.

Dolby’s customers access Software Development Kits (SDKs) containing code, development guides and testing materials via a secure portal. But the process for Dolby’s employees to publish and update kits was antiquated and labor-intensive. More importantly, Dolby’s customers found the experience inefficient, costly and out of date.

The Insight

State-of-the-art technology, outdated experience.

Dolby's customer portal is used almost exclusively by technologists — developers, engineers and testers. "Why can't this be like GitHub?" asked one developer. "Simple, familiar, intuitive ... with easy access to just the stuff I need, when I need it." For this audience, a beautiful design is an experience that works beautifully.

Dolby logo on video screens.

The Research

Less talking, more listening.

Primacy spoke with dozens of Dolby's stakeholders and end-customers — from sales teams and business leads to developers and tech writers. Our interviews were condensed into three days of on-site marathon discovery sessions. In addition, we performed a heuristic audit of the current portal experience and pored over interview transcripts from preliminary customer interview sessions conducted by the client.

Before and after screenshots of Dolby pages showing new design

The Ideation

Accelerating through collaboration and iteration.

To accelerate the design process, we collaborated with Dolby’s UX leaders to create customer workflows, personas and journey maps in real-time. We then developed and tested simple concept sketches to see how different UX designs were received. Dolby’s UX team shared the concepts to get input from different stakeholders, while Primacy reworked the taxonomy of the developer kit to establish a structure for Dolby as they re-worked their SDK publishing process. Throughout, we met with Dolby's CMS Platform Partner, Ingeniux, to ensure the experience we proposed was within scope and doable.

Dolby log in and log out experience
Venn diagram showing Content playback and Distribution circles with Dolby in the center
Dolby logo with sound mixers

The Results

The Dolby Portal re-engineered in less than 4 months.

Dolby’s UX, design and tech teams collaborated with Primacy in designing a comprehensive set of wireframes along with high-level prototypes that were tested first internally at Dolby and then with customers across the globe. We then worked with Dolby's brand team to ensure the visual design of the new interface was on brand, and created a more consistent experience for customers. Our new design leveraged navigation cues found within tech hubs that would be familiar to the user, which eased adoption, shortened the learning curve and made it more user-friendly.