We’ve been listening and watching how you and your users interact with the Widen Collective® over the last year, and even visited 39 customers in 2017. Through this, we’ve gained a fresh perspective on how usability and accessibility matters to the overall experience and success of using the Collective.

We’re always working hard to deliver value-driven changes to our software solutions.

Sometimes changes in our software are obvious, like when we launch a new product like Portals. Or when there’s a visual change to the user interface. Other times, changes are less obvious, like when we work on the back-end to support increased consumption of 25 million total assets, bulk uploads of 1.5 million assets, and 14 million embed code views per day.

To help you understand how our teams are always working to deliver the best solution, we wanted to share how we make software at Widen.

The MarTech conference brings together 2,500+ marketing and IT executives and managers. In addition to attending sessions, our team gathered some great insights from one-on-one conversations with marketers and IT pros at our booth. Here’s a look at some of the key themes and takeaways.

For the last several months, we’ve traveled around the world observing your teams, your environment, and your culture to learn how you communicate, connect, and contribute. You’ve shared with us the big and small things you need to get it all done...so what have we learned?

Editors note: For the latest on image recognition and auto-tagging, read Do DAM Professionals Think Image Recognition is Finally Ready for Digital Asset Management? and Your Auto-tagging Recipe for Success.

As of today, human intelligence is still king when it comes to accuracy and efficiency with your metadata.

But just because image recognition and AI aren’t 100% ready to tackle your metadata problems, doesn’t mean they won’t be one day. In fact, when they are it will finally be time to automate metadata tagging — which will free up your DAMster’s time for other tasks. Until that time, you’ll need to call upon the expertise of a dedicated DAM admin.

Think creatively. Try something new. Help others.

These are just a few of our cultural traits seen on the lobby wall as soon as you walk in the front door at Widen. Widen employees and teams are encouraged to exercise creative freedoms daily. That’s one of the values that makes Widen one of Madison’s best places to work, and why we’re so inspired to help customers solve marketing, creative, technology and communication problems.

By Libby Maurer and Deanna Ballew of the Widen Product Team

As we move forward with more frequent product updates as part of our Agile process, we’ll be sharing more details with you about key new features. Here’s more about updates that have been made to our Intended Use feature.

At this point, you have probably heard this term “Agile” either from Widen or maybe in your latest marketing meeting. It all sounds fine and dandy: software companies listening to their customers, teams favoring valuable outcomes over output and all touting a newfound ability to flex and adapt schedules based on changing technologies and customer input. However, coming from a former project manager, I get it, but I want to see it in action. How does “Wagile” work?

See the latest updates to the Widen Media Collective - From the Widen Product Team

By Libby Maurer, Widen Product Manager, with Deanna Ballew and the Widen Product Team

As consumers of web-based technologies, we’re often faced with interface updates when we least expect them, leaving us wondering why. We’d like to offer a peek behind the curtain and share the “why” behind what’s new and different with the Media Collective in version 8.0.