Renovating Nike’s Digital Material Library

DMA is Nike’s internal textile library produced for Nike Sportswear and Footwear. This library is a catalog of every material available to Nike designers, across every product line. The preceding application relied on manual photography and data entry, which was maintained by a librarian. We created a new, data-connected DMA, linking materials to our manufacturing databases, and using 3D scanning technology, digitized those materials into textures that can be utilized in our 3D design software. This opened a Pandora’s box of feature opportunities and data conundrums.

As a prerequisite to DMA, we needed an application that enabled our 3D modelers to upload the 3D scanned material textures and link them to their respective material data in our CMSs. I designed a simple app for this purpose.

Then, I tackled the data.

There were three sets of data that needed to be incorporated into the DPC platform. These fields were fed by two (sometimes conflicting) content management systems and the legacy DMA library. Rather than designing with a complex and bloated data set, I parsed, sorted, and combined these data fields to be used for the material detail and search filters.

After sorting the data sets, I designed a new DMA that was more apt to searching and viewing material images & data.

Along with a newly designed interface and streamlined filtering, I implemented many new features that catered to Nike designers:

• Material palettes for seasonal line plans
• Personal boards for saving your favorite materials
• Dark mode for better viewing of materials
• Material Detail inclusive of all manufacturer data

I prototyped and user tested potential improvements with users, designed features for future improvements based on requests from our designers, and maintained a UX backlog in Jira.

As DMA developed, I conceptualized how DMA could evolve to incorporate not just materials, but all digital assets within Digital Product Creation.

The idea was a one-stop shop: shoe CADs, models, digital samples, light rigs, and video assets, along with new features such as activity feeds and custom feature sets, combined to enable every step of Digital Product Creation. This would be the future of DMA.