Smoothing out internal content creation for our CMS
Increased efficiency for writers, QA and CMS operators working with our new component-based system
“Wow, this is very comprehensive, amazing work – thank you so much 😊”
Melissa Navarrete
Marketing Manager @ Bible Society
UX & Product Designer
UX Research
Cross-team collaboration
Documentation creation
New product page template to increase e-commerce
Increased the visibility of the ‘Order now’ button by 3.8x
“Wow, this is very comprehensive, amazing work – thank you so much 😊”
Melissa Navarrete
Marketing Manager @ Bible Society
UX & Product Designer
UX Research
Cross-team collaboration
Templates
UX & Product Designer
UX Research
Cross-team collaboration
Templates
Project overview
As the UX and Product Designer at Bible Society, I led a project that successfully:
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reduce friction in content creation
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and improve the scalability of the new product-led component system across the organisation
How might we onboard our content writers into the new product-led component system for our websites and improve the quality and clarity of written content handed to CMS operators so pages can be built faster, with fewer edits, and better alignment to the new design system?
A visual representation of the broken workflow from creating content for the website, through QA, and to the webpage build.
The problem
Success criteria
To track the success of this project, we looked at the following qualitative and quantitative feedback:
Qualitative:
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Do our content writers have a clear understanding of writing for the web and our new components?
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Can our QA team quickly and easily read and make changes to the material submitted to them?
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Does our CMS Operator clearly understand the writer's intent and structure so they can easily build the pages in our CMS?
Quantitative:
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What impact has our solution had on the time it takes for our CMS Operator to create a page?
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What percentage of material reaching our CMS Operator is clearly set out, following the new guidelines?
The 1st iteration was created as a form with all the fields for each component for the writers to fill in. This was then tested with a small group of our copywriters.
Testing revealed the form-based system didn’t meet user needs — writers weren’t using them, and instead requested clearer references and layout guidance. The feedback also revealed a new pain point; the new product-led approach often meant the copywriters in each team were responsible for the page structure as well as writing the content.
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Using the feedback, the v2 was created in MS Word. It used:
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a table of contents with ‘scroll to’ links to speed up navigation
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metadata guidance for SEO and accessibility
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an example of how to lay out a page for QA and the CMS operator
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a high-level overview of ‘how to set out a webpage’
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an easy-to-follow reference page for each component
Testing showed this refined v2 provided the information and structure each team needed. We launched the reference guide with a presentation for our copywriters, QA team, and CMS operator.
Examples of the different iterations of the ‘Writers’ guideline document.
Iteration
The success of the new documentation has aligned internal teams and processes and will allow the continued scaling of our product-based component system.
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100% adoption across writing, QA, and CMS roles
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The guide is now part of the official documentation and is used for training new staff in each team
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Reduced CMS build time per page
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Improved content accuracy at first delivery
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Writers feel more confident working in the product-led system
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QA can carry out their job efficiently.
“This is a really helpful doc.” - Heather Vandamme, Supporter Experience Officer, Fundraising, Bible Society
“Wow, this is very comprehensive, amazing work – thank you so much 😊” - Melissa Navarrete, Marketing Manager, Bible Society
Results
This project emphasised the importance of onboarding internal users and stakeholders when rolling out system changes. Even though the onboarding was pushed aside due to multiple large projects landing in close succession, more could have been done earlier in the process to help with the change to a product-based system approach.
Lessons learnt
Research summary
Research revealed pain points in our internal processes and a need to increase our digital maturity. Content was being written in outdated formats or without a clear structure due to confusion and uncertainty about the new product-led component system. In turn, this made it difficult and time-consuming for the CMS Operator to assemble pages accurately and efficiently.
The need was emphasised on a multilingual project where the character counts varied across translations and still needed to sit comfortably within each component.
User stories
From this research, we developed the following user stories:
As a copywriter
I want to understand the components available, character counts for the fields within each component, and how to structure webpages
So that I can write copy that both connects with our audience and fits the components we have.
As a Quality Assurance person
I want to be able to easily check and make changes to documents
So that copy goes out on brand without taking more time to process than it does at the moment.
As the CMS operator
I want to receive all copy and content for the page I am building in the correct layout and with the correct character count
So that I don’t have to rewrite copy that has been written and checked in order to fit the components available.