Purpose in UX

In a recent project, the aim is to build a new video editor. The aim of this editor is to split a video in certain segments, each with a start and an endpoint.

The editor consists of three “pages”. One lets you choose the video to edit, one gives you an overview of the already existing segments and the final page lets you edit a segment.

The video is embedded in our CMS and gets used for different use cases. One use case is to select a segment to insert it into a CMS article. Another use case is to cut a new video into different segments.

When we started with the integration, it became obvious how different the editor is used for these two use cases. The editor supports both use cases, but of course it doesn’t know which use case is used.

So, we changed that. The CMS appends an additional GET parameter called purpose. When we think the CMS user is going to pick a video, we give the editor the purpose “selection”. If we think it is used for cutting the video apart we use the purpose “cut”.

This means we can adjust the editor to the use case. In case of selection we can add a “select” button already in the segment overview. And when the use case is “cut”, we can add a button in the segment editor to easily save the segment and create a new one.

This change didn’t take a lot of effort to implement, yet the additional benefit for our users is quite big.