Empowering Content Managers
Content management for internal news and announcements
Summary
With the new internal CMS platform, admins can create, edit, and manage announcements that appear on the homepage
Impact
Reduced cycle time from 3 days to 5 minutes per piece of content
Team
Sole UX designer working with a product owner and engineering team
Achievements
- Scalable: Create, edit and archive numerous announcement content cards
- Flexible: Accepts multiple file formats and displays on any page on the site
- Powerful: Empowers admins to manage content without the need to manually code
Problem
There was an opportunity to increase productivity.
My client's platform needed a serious facelift for the homepage. The service team wanted to manage news and promote products for their employees, but the current process required the development team to manually do this.
This bottleneck cut productivity from the development team and also caused a long wait for the admins to see their requests go through.
We wanted to improve the experience for both the administrators and the end users, so that admins can promote important news through the homepage, and the users can learn more about the services available to them.
Design Goals
I met with the admins on a daily basis to set the requirements for both the homepage and the admin CMS:
- Admins are tasked with many other responsibilities, so this process must be simple and quick.
- The new interface should give admins control over content management.
- The app should have a full record on all announcements created in the platform.
- The homepage should include important news and information promoting its services and be easy to navigate.
Ideation
Early explorations included stacked cards.
My initial concepts stayed above the fold, but had several limitations. They were easy to scan, but felt cluttered because too much content was competing for attention. I decided that flow, engaging users to explore the whole page, was the solution to simplicity.
Landing Page
The homepage focused on progressive disclosure and visual hierarchy.
The final homepage design was responsive, scannable and flowed well. It featured a carousel for multiple announcements, and it also helped users transition smoothly down the page.
Challenges
Admin functionality
There were challenges to determining how much control to provide on the admin tool. The team and I specified the following constraints:
- Restrict stylistic control since the admins' basic need was to just create and edit content. The design is flexible for templatization.
- Maximum character lengths and photo resolution to for better readability.
- After implementation, there were a few announcements posted with text wrapping, causing one card to be longer than the others. In this case, the team decided to match the card lengths to the longest one.
Final Design
Implementation
The admin app had to be very simple but powerful enough to handle any type of announcement on any page. The main page is divided by a list of published, drafts, and archived announcements. The admins have full capability to create, edit, publish, and delete announcements with this app, essentially eliminating the time spent requesting the development team to do this.
Feedback
What's next?
After the initial deployment, the average time spent on managing content reduced to 5 minutes, compared to several days.
Next phase iterations:
- Automated archiving after a period of time
- Linking knowledge base articles