Some Spider
CMS Design
Redesign the backend tools for editors.
Some Spider Studios was a fast-growing media and entertainment company with the brands Scary Mommy, The Dad, and Fatherly. The CMS for the editors was through Wordpress. While Wordpress was an efficient tool in the early stages of the startup, it was failing to provide a great experience for the user.
Objective
Affiliate articles are a high-value way to drive revenue. Editors were struggling to efficiently create affiliate articles, and add products to the articles.
Research
Conducting user interviews, members of each team walked us through creating an affiliate page, and talked through their process.
We identified the most commonly used tools, as well as frustrations with the CMS.
Key Takeaways
Too much clutter.
Conducting user interviews with members of each team, we identified the most commonly used tools.
Adding a product isn’t straightforward.
Manually inputting each product was time consuming, and adding that product to an article was not intuitive.
Too many extra steps.
Users were required to check a box that differentiated the affiliated article from a standard article. This box was buried and often hard to find.
Design
Once I identified the users’ most commonly used tools, I started with quick wireframes trying different solutions.
I focused on the most commonly used tools and removed all the unnecessary tools, making the first step of the users task of adding an article quickly accessible. This removed the clutter and created a more streamlined experience.
Creating a universal template across all brands will save engineering resources down the line. Any changes will be reflected across all brands.
Article input page
The user can edit the title and subhead, add a feature image. By eliminating unnecessary tools, I was able to free up space to include a mobile preview area.
Product Database
Adding a product database gives the user more flexibility with the text edits, while saving time as products are often used across all brands.
