Empathy is central to Widen’s values and culture. It is reflected in our respect for teammates, our exceptional customer service, and our commitment to employing people with developmental disabilities. Our CEO, Matthew Gonnering, speaks about the importance of empathy in business, in his TEDx talk.

So our interest in building software that’s accessible to all users is a natural extension of our mindset around empathy and inclusion. We’d like to share where we are in our effort to meet accessibility standards across our digital asset management (DAM) platform, the Widen Collective^®.

Accurate metadata allows users across your organization to find and retrieve assets quickly. With rapidly growing libraries of content, keeping metadata up-to-date can be a time-consuming challenge. Digital asset management (DAM) admins are often tasked with applying metadata for large batches of assets from activities like photoshoots, product updates, and rebrands.

A digital asset management (DAM) system is only as valuable as the content in it. A consistent flow of new, useful, and usable assets keeps teams coming back for more. Eventually, using the DAM system becomes a key part of their workflow. But enabling content creators to properly upload assets can be a challenge. So our team set out to make the process simpler.

The search system within the Widen Collective^Ⓡ allows our 500,000+ users to find the digital assets they need. Across every Collective site the search system's job is to store all of uploaded asset information in a format that can be searched in a wide variety of ways; so that it can return results that are accurate, complete, and in compliance with the platform's governance structure. All in a matter of milliseconds! This is a highly complex system that has gone through several major overhauls over the past 15+ years to keep pace with the exponential growth of data that Widen handles. This post is the tale of that evolution over time, and the steps we take to ensure its ability to scale into the future.

“I think when implementing something new, or when something comes with a change, fear is completely natural...the audience reaction to the new site was our biggest fear.” – Maria Jose Torres, Steelcase

We had so many amazing entries for the 2019 DAM Good Dashboard Contest. It was a tough call, but we have our winners!

Do you know how much your feedback shapes what the Widen Collective looks like and does? Your experiences and expectations using Collective influence the design and development direction we take. Your input even gives us ideas on what should be included in new apps that we create from scratch.

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.