CBSi Highlander
Platform Tools - Desktop and mobile app
Work: Primary research, Wireframing, UI/UX, Front-end, Illustration
Role: Full-time
Team: Product Manager, Engineering lead, Project Manager, Front-end developers (In Sydney, AU as well as San Francisco)
My role at CBSi started as a web and marketing designer across multiple business units. During a company reorganization, it became apparent that all the business units needed a common platform to manage their content.
The Problem: Editors across multiple business units used different methods and apps to perform similar content management functions. IT support for all of the different software had become unfeasible. The apps were also clunky and included many time-consuming workarounds.
Initial marketing work
I had worked as a front-end designer for multiple brands within CBSi for years. It put me in a unique position to know stakeholders across the entire company.
Primary Research
When I asked editors across the company about the current state of content management tools, I received enormous amounts of feedback. Outdated tools and strange work-arounds had added layers of complexity. Images were an especially painful point.
It became clear that improving image management for news editors would raise productivity across the company. They were bogged down by strange technicalities.
I started to consolidate image use cases across a beta group of business units.
Wireframes
I designed hundreds of wireframes at different fidelities to iron out specific product requirements.
Each brand could apply their own visual style to the the new CMS - also known as Highlander.
Developed with Bootstrap and Sass, I created a set of styles for each brand that let them look like themselves while sharing a centralized - and more easily maintained, CMS.
Internal marketing
Enthusiastic adoption was required for a centralized CMS concept to work. I designed printed onboarding materials as well as the internal FAQ and tutorial help pages. Because one of our stakeholders was a huge lego fan, I illustrated an isometric Highlander “Hub” lego person and it became our gentle CMS mascot.
The isometric illustrations ended up being so popular, I also redesigned CBSi’s larger internal tool website using the same visual theme .
End result: Editor productivity went up by 33%.
New editors were onboarded faster and had fewer questions for the more senior reporters, who then had more time for their reporting. The internal engineering team was better able to support and manage requests from different business units. Overall CMS tickets - both bugs and feature requests - went down 65%. Another huge positive - editors across the many CBSi brands felt heard.
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