Freeing up editorial creativity through creative UX – Design Make Do #1

A presentation given at the first Design Make Do event, sponsored by Which? and Nakama.

Background

I was lead UX designer and researcher on a project to reimagine the CMS for journalists. In this, I tried to balance the workflow needs and pain points of the practitioner stakeholders with the efficiency and work practices desired by managerial stakeholders.

We ran a dual track agile process with discovery running three to six months ahead of delivery.

Over two years, the whole newsroom was transferred to the new CMS front end and not only were the efficiency savings were demonstrable and the UI was well accepted.

Outline of talk

How stakeholders were involved from the outset.

How reflecting on the needs and processes of journalists, in turn, changed some of our UX practices.

Particularly, we did away with large, detailed wireframes and instead used Google Slides to capture modular UI behaviour and designs.

This allowed everyone in the process to see and comment on every feature.