Macrovision Hawkeye

Macrovision, being a world leader in copy protection, needed a way for their SafeDisc and CDS300 (which I also designed) anti-piracy systems to have trackable metrics to justify their customers' ROI in the technology. If a label bought into the system, they should be able to monitor its impact on preventing music piracy.

With this mandate, Macrovision created a peer-to-peer file sharing content management service called Hawkeye™. Hawkeye monitored the traffic on the major P2P networks, detected what music was being traded, and offered record labels a way to stem the effectiveness of such piracy through digital rights management.

They asked Fluid, Inc. to design its front-end client interface. I developed the information architecture, visual design, and overall layout of the product and its chart output. The main interface was delivered with CSS-styled JSP, while the chart-rendering component was ported from a server chart package to a dynamic Flash system. The rest of my team included two client-side coders and an enterprise-class Flash engineer.

Working with Macrovision, the design evolved from an inflexible UI with limited data into a more rigidly-structured interface with much deeper intelligence and tight layout guidelines. I also hand-illustrated a full icon library and specified a full style guide for both the application and its dynamic charts.