Author Experience

This is a study about the back-end authoring tools of a website I built as the user experience lead. Serving our readers would only be possible if I also served our content authors and in-house creative team.

Discovery

While building the plan for this site, it quickly became clear that fresh content would play a key role. The downside was that we had no existing structure for producing and curating content, so my goal was to streamline the production process as much as possible. 

I interviewed the new site's editor-in-chief, and made one of my recurring internal testers. Key iterations always solicited her feedback, and often included members of her team. Throughout these meetings I found several opportunities to improve the content authoring process.

Speed

Templates could standardize input and speed up post creation, but also ran the risk of making content stale and repetitive. By working with the content team, we built frameworks for several different types of posts. I identified the ones that, when used as part of a broader content plan, were conducive to templates without sacrificing quality. 

One was "roundups" - lists of our favorite restaurants, decorations, or holiday recipes. I built an input form that let authors choose the number of items in their roundup, and then access each in a numbered tab. There were boxes to paste in a headline, copy, link, and upload a photo. This was important to the content team because there was very little existing Wordpress knowledge prior to this project. There was no time spent on formatting, and less time spent on approval as the intake template provided instructions, character limits, and automatically scaled and cropped images.

Style

Custom post types let authors work fast, but it can't be an excuse for ugly work. A requirement from stakeholders was a "clean, modern aesthetic - like a nice magazine". It was important that that aesthetic be applied as consistently and as automatically as possible, and was not left as a burden to content authors.

An example was our main, freeform post type. With no special templating or intake fields, this would be the post used for longer articles and a wide array of stories. After agreeing on a wireframe, I made a checklist for "automatic style features". This included a drop cap built with pseudo-selectors in CSS that would be applied automatically. An "end of article" mark was applied in the same way, to reinforce the feel of magazine. Image style applied based on the selections within Wordpress. Put another way, the author could simply choose left, right or center alignment, and my style guide applied a consistent crop, placement and caption style. 

Scalability

This sit would need to adapt to content needs as they inevitably changed. This meant documenting the process for creating custom post types, and keeping the existing custom fields and templates well organized. Consistency was key, and I wanted to avoid repeating effort as much as possible. I created a naming convention that allowed fields to be re-used in multiple applications, and a stylesheet that was documented and well organized. This made firing up new post templates more like assembling LEGO, so author needs could be responded to quickly and easily.