When your users manage 80 stories an hour, 'good enough' isn't good enough
Large media organizations publish several articles, galleries, and videos every hour, and editors and journalists must manage these large amounts of complex content daily. The challenge lies in offering a solution that helps users quickly identify and interact with relevant content, despite the vast volume and variety of content types. WebSked, an application within the ArcXP platform, aims to be this solution.
Based on numerous help tickets, qualitative interviews and stakeholder feedback — particularly from technical sales and customer support — it became apparent that improvements were needed to WebSked around efficiency. How can we increase the efficiency and engagement of editorial teams using WebSked? How can we streamline content management workflows in Arc XP's WebSked platform?
"We need story cards with minimum info to help get a global view of the daily plan at a glance. We have 70-80 stories a day."
How can we increase the efficiency and engagement of editorial teams using WebSked? How can we streamline content management workflows in Arc XP's WebSked platform?
From first audit to final QA: design leadership across the full product lifecycle
As the main design stakeholder, my main goal was to understand the current state of the application and work with stakeholders and leadership to uncover the best steps forward in revamping the application. Once the application was understood I worked with the team to create a vision of the most used pages and user flows.
I conducted extensive user interviews to understand how users defined complex content cards, the priority of data, and additional metadata needs. I systematically categorized all the data the application had access to, defined the most complex and simplest versions of a content card, and ensured the cards were responsive and adaptable to different screen sizes and international right-to-left (RTL) layouts.
Start with the user task, not the feature request
↓Click the video below to watch it in full screen.
Recorded walk-through of week-view interactions and filter use.
Three times research changed the plan — and why that was right
Calendar View: removing the "Not Assigned" section. The original calendar design included a top section showing unassigned content — originally thought important to give users visibility of potential tasks. Feedback from usability tests and surveys informed us that users would rather filter content and save that space, allowing them to view more relevant content at once. The research overrode the original assumption.
Search: letting users define the architecture. Rather than defaulting to a direction, we used wireframes of four different approaches — inline horizontal filters, peak overlay, inline vertical filters, and top overlay — to drive a conversation with leadership and engineering. The interview process also continually updated our understanding of use cases, so the final architecture evolved throughout the project.
Content Cards: maximum data, minimum space. Survey results throughout the design process showed that users liked the content cards with the most data possible, but wanted the card to take up little vertical space to see as many pieces of content as possible at once. This finding directly shaped the final card design — dense but scannable, flexible enough to support RTL layouts for international users.
↓Click the video below to watch it in full screen.
Recorded walk-through of search and filter interactions.
From cluttered to scannable: the planning page redesign
Content Cards: from low fidelity to final design
Impact across three launches
Increased editorial team engagement with WebSked by 25%, measured by the frequency of interactions with key features like the calendar view and search functions. One-third of users promptly incorporated the new calendar view into their daily workflows after launch. Content cards earned a 90% user satisfaction score and drove a 68% workflow improvement.