Built on Blocks CMS

The Starting Point

For this tool we started from an early prototype designed and built by our Marketing Engineering team. Planned around technical requirements and team initiatives, the product was functional but lacking an understanding of the perspective of its future users. In our initial planning, we broke down the problem into key use cases after interviewing marketing teammates across functions.

The Research

Adopting a roughly Agile methodology, we first formulated a round of testing based on this early state product based on the use cases we had uncovered. Over 2 sprints we brought in future users of the tool to test for issue areas we could address with that round of updates. In consolidating notes after each interview, I rank ordered our teams priorities through a combination of difficulty they posed to users, commonalities in issues, and difficulty in implementing tiers of proposed solutions to discuss with engineering.

The Priority Actions

Two key action items in our first round became apparent across almost every test—the clarity in choosing layouts to add to the page, and the lack of ability to manage the order of and holistically view section structure. Adding a “block” improvements were centered around a new module showing previews of each section and ordering them into logical categories. While more advanced drag and drop and show/hide algorithmic functions were conceived, as a v1 we moved forward with simple up/down rearranging and a collapsing folder action.

The Dashboard

Moving to the second sprint along with ongoing labeling and tooltip updates, an overhaul to the dashboard became a need as more and more pages were migrated and built. Stages of the redesign were broken into the following phases: previewing card UI, search and filtering, then finally a condensed list view. These updates coincided with the rollout of BoB to the larger team to begin building and editing live pages across the site.