OLIO
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THE CHALLENGE
Working with the Content Team I was tasked with improving the authoring journey on Sitecore (content management system) for our Content Editors.
Using a 3rd party platform brought challenges as I had to work with in a rigid UI. Working on the homepage meant that there was a lot of pressure in case anything went wrong. It also
The Research
Observational Study
In order to understand how I could improve the Content Editors day to day working lives I first had to understand how they worked - their flow when creating the home page.
I sat down with 4 different Content Editors and watched how they worked, asking questions when they did things I couldn’t understand. From this observation I was able to see a few areas that could really speed up the process and give them the opportunity to focus on the more creative aspects of the job, rather than the repetitive. These were:
The web and app feeds were created separately - and in 2 very different ways
Regions switched without their knowledge leaving a lot of room for error
The process of creating new components was so slow that they would copy and paste - more room for error
There was an approval process that wasn’t used as it should have been
The experience editor slowed down component building - especially grid
Ideation
I first decided to run an ideation session where I invited the Content Editors, Engineers, and a Business Analyst to come up with ideas of how they envisioned the system working best for them.
With there being so many restrictions this helped us to start thinking but the changes we would have liked to have made were impossible.
With this project I had to take a slightly different approach. Being the ‘voice’ of my users who were the content editors I sat down with the Engineers on the team and talked through the different issues and using some of our ideas we came up with ways of solving the problems the users were having.
Solution
As there were multiple issues we tackled each one separately.
Switching Regions
Working with 9 different language stores meant that when the Content Editors were creating multiple components, during a homepage refresh for example, they would often create content in the wrong region. This meant that a lot of unnecessary components were being created and left, which cluttered up the system and slowed everything down. Working with the engineers we came up with a Google Chrome plugin which would sit across the top right corner of their screen alerting them to which region they were in.
After implementing this solution I sat down with the Content Editors to get feedback and observe