Redesigning CMS Flows to Accomodate Multiple User Roles

Focusing on cms ease of use For when multiple users contribute or publish changes to the live site

Client: Rocket Communications
Industry: UX Design, Front-End Development
Project Type: CMS redesign, desktop
Duration: 3 Weeks

Rocket Communications is an enterprise UX design company focused on quality designs of critical systems: financial systems, medical devices, or satellite command and communications systems. Rocket Com developed a CMS (content management system) for SATCOM, specifying UX guidelines for standardized designs. Rocket has designed for companies such as Apple, US Air Force Space Command, Intel, HP, Oracle, and Cisco.

Problem
"There is no structured flow or hierarchy for users. Anyone can publish."

We have an interesting case where our users are our stakeholders. From a user standpoint, the navigation is not clear and you have to click through multiple buttons to accomplish a task. The user goal would be to navigate and accomplish primary tasks on the CMS with ease and efficiency. On the stakeholder end, the CMS lacks structured user roles. Undefined roles lead to unclear responsibilities, specifically with the publishing flow. The stakeholder goal would be to establish user roles within the CMS and to create a hierarchy of responsibilities among users.

Methods:

• User Interview
• Heuristic Evaluation
• Competitive Analysis

solution
Design the CMS for three main users.

We redesigned the site architecture for easy and intuitive navigation.

Originally, our stakeholders believed there to be 4 user roles: Admin, Publisher, Editor, and Writer. We defined 3 user roles and responsibilities within the CMS after user surveys indicated that users combined "editor" and "writer" roles. We finalized Admin, Editor, and Contributor as the CMS users and we wanted to form a cohesive relationship between each user role.

• Rearrangement of the CMS site navigation
• Development of CMS User Hierarchy

Methods:

• User Survey
• Usability Testing

Deliverables
Key research findings, Heuristic Evaluation, sitemap, user flows, MOCKUPS, prototype

We focused the design on the admin and publishing flows, where the admin or editor would go in, authorize changes, and publish a new CMS version to the live site. Ease of use, understandable navigation, and least amount of clicks were prioritized.

My role was Product Manager with additional specification on UX design and creative strategy. I worked closely with the client with constant focus on the site architecture and user feedback.

Tools:

• Sketch
• Invision
• Procreate 

Results + reflections

We struggled with grand re-design ideas since we did not know the developer limits to the CMS. With constant communication with our stakeholders, we were able to find a middle ground of practical and efficient design. Since Rocket's user pool was so small, vast user hierarchies on Wordpress or Facebook did not parallel well with our user base. We had to distill the best practices of user hierarchies to adapt to our small user pool's priorities.

Bringing users into the process at each milestone helped us iterate a better CMS. Next steps would include improved information architecture of the other tabs available to users (files, images, etc.).