OVERVIEW

Role: Principal UX Designer for external users, UX Designer for CMS users

For: KPBS & NPR

Date: Mar 2021 – April 2022 

In 2021 KPBS received a grant and funding to upgrade its CMS from Ellington to Brightspot Enterprise. KPBS is an NPR member station (1000+) that self-identifies as non-biased, trustworthy news. A major part of the decision to make a move over to Brightspot was to deepen journalism and content collaboration within NPR’s station network while simultaneously making content creation easier. Additionally, the station was seeing a jump in viewership, website impressions, and podcast downloads due to COVID-19, the spread and rise of activism, and the general landscape of politics. 

However, the majority of these users were categorized as “new.” Internal reporting also found that “returning” users had difficulty becoming “loyal” users.

THE PROBLEM(S):

• Create workflows for our content creators (grant) 

• Convert new users to returning, or loyal users. Increase the conversion of returning users to loyal users. With special considerations to loyal users, our oldest (literally) demographic.

• Migrate 10 years' worth of content within three months, website launch was September 27, considering accessibility, information architecture, and cognitive load on our older users.

• Brightspot had dropped the ball on having an actual working CMS. We were working within a half-finished CMS on a short deadline.

UX PROCESS AND WORKFLOW

 The first thing we did was to hold stakeholder interviews to discuss how the teams operate within KPBS, this included contented creators and involved discussing their editing workflow and any collaboration between teams. This allowed us to gain insight into internal users' workflow. We used this information to allow us to leverage tools already offered into Grove and the opportunity to create new ones. All teams were asked the same questions and meetings were recorded for future reference.

Due to the historical context of the website and grant requirements we discussed with the teams what content absolutely needed to be prioritized, what was legal information, and what could be archived. APIs and goals were also considered.

While we were designing for the internal users as much as the external readers, due to lack of time we decided on a screener survey within Typeform.

• What is your age?

• Why do you visit news sites?

• What do you often read about?

• How do you get your news?

• Do you get your news from the same source?

HIGHLIGHTS:

• Newsletters (tripled our monthly subscribers!!)

• One Book, One San Diego (22 nominations in a day to 72!)

  • using the new Alert Bars

• Black Culture page, now working on a Latinx Page

  • We get a lot of positive feedback from the community about this project via our Hearken Embeds

  • More coming up in events

• Membership Tiers

  • Applied gestalt theory and UX writing

  • The membership team is happy

• Our next big thing… Events and Spotify for Public Media Broadcast?

OUTCOMES & LESSONS LEARNED

At the inception of the project most of my previous work had come from working with small teams, I also did not have much experience with the internal workings of a CMS. Now I have more insight on what it’s like to work with requirements, constraints and federal funding. I’ve also really learned that UX design can sometimes be about negotiating, trade-offs, and sometimes even picking your battles. But the biggest lesson…. Documentation is key.