Enterprise UX Governance

TLDR: what happens when a multinational corporation maintains a catalogue of 150 digital products, all designed and maintained separately? Absolute UX mayhem. Cue my efforts on their new team intended to add some clarity and direction to their UX group of over 250 fine people.

Project

OneUX Design System (tentative name)

Client

ADP

Role

Lead UX Designer

Team

Design System (20), UX department (250+)

Environment

remote

Methodology

agile

Website

N/A (all work for internal business systems products)

Key Skills

Design system, Patterns, Documentation, Component library, Wireframing, Research, Sketch to Figma transition

Summary

Provide UX governance; consistency and clarity to the many product and design teams through a well-built and documented design system.

Overview

In mid 2021, someone at ADP either noticed (or was notified) that their deep catalogue of digital products and services were completely misaligned.

Different designs, UX patterns, components, navigational conventions, etc. plagued the lot.

Perhaps difficult to identify from within, but painfully obvious to any customers using multiple ADP products everyday.

So in late 2021, they inaugurated a special new Design System team with the mandate to audit and realign all company UX/UI efforts.

How I joined this project

Technically headhunted by their official third-party agency partner, I joined in early 2022 interested in taking on a truly massive, complex challenge.

While it didn’t directly satisfy one of my prime directives to help society or improve the world, positively impacting tens of millions around the world using ADPs products in their everyday lives is arguably a related pursuit.

Objectives

In a nutshell: standardise everything and package it for mass consumption.

This included a catalogue topping 150 digital products and a UX team of over 250 talented professionals.

To tackle this, we divided deliverables into several categories:

  • Foundations (aka global atoms, partial gallery shown below)
  • Component library – including code alignment
  • Patterns
  • Photos
  • Illustrations
  • Documentation

Publishing methods

As for the packaging end, we began by publishing an internal documentation website, though as we began authoring content, it quickly became obvious that maintaining everything in multiple areas and in multiple formats (Sketch, Figma, Miro, CMS-based web publisher) was not only inefficient, but an invitation to very quickly amass enormous volumes of UX debt.

Partnering with engineering, we then created a utility for Figma’s API that could, for the interim, scrape documentation from inside our design files and publish it, eliminating redundancies.

Long term, we planned to eschew the website altogether and harbour all documentation alongside the design content itself, inside the Figma library files published to the entire organisation, reserving any website presence for a public edition.

Process failures

In effort to avoid any bias or unpleasant impressions, I will limit these points purely to factual details without commentary and leaving any quality inferences to the reader.

  • A Director and several Lead level designers from our Design System team, all with a decade or more service to ADP, left the company within the first few weeks of my arrival.
    • VP inherited all of the subordinate Director’s duties for about six months.
    • A single VP stretched between dozens of “direct reports” left scarce time for anyone to discuss issues or progress.
  • HR, onboarding, payroll, etc functions fell to said VP rather than individuals’ managers, which prevented requisitioning hardware/ software licenses and introduced occasional payroll issues.
    • After nearly a year, I never did receive a computer or mobile licences, instead needing to configure my personal hardware and software to work with or around their VPN.
  • Full time employees enjoy a robust onboarding experience; contractors receive a link to someone’s Webex recording briefly describing a few of the company’s key digital products.

My contributions

Throughout a near-year with the team, my efforts were focused thus:

  1. Complete their enterprise “UI Shell” and navigational construct
    • building the components
    • aligning with code
    • documenting all functionality and usage
  2. Author patterns
    • identify
    • research
    • illustrate
    • write and publish documentation
  3. Assist with enterprise transition from Sketch to Figma

UI Shell

This may have been the most complex aspect of the entire design system as it touches literally every person and product.

Nothing like a trial by fire as my first endeavour! 🔥

Component building

An incomplete array of assets and concepts existed in a derelict Sketch file started by someone long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away…

While that original file’s contents cannot be shown here, I can share excerpts of the final output below.

Specifically, I needed to convert any relevant, existing assets to Figma or create whatever necessary to fill the gaps across the atomic food chain.

To do this, I spent nearly a month in discovery, tracking down technical details, usage patterns, interviewing users, engineers, designers, etc. to map the truly mind-boggling number of requirements and pieces of the overall puzzle.

Below, you can see some of the atoms and molecules included within the layout. Others were hidden outside the visible area and withheld from publishing directly to library subscribers.

In all, nearly a hundred components and sub-components were created for this single system feature. 🤯

Since this universal shell was a bit foreign to many teams, I also needed to create some templates and examples for designers, including defining the coded environments’ actual column grids and break points, along with variations appropriate for each.

Curiously, developers in their thoroughness created breakpoints for the mega menu even on mobile where it would not be ideal, and where no patterns or direction had yet been given. Because we initially aimed for 100% code alignment, I also included horizontal menu examples for mobile that could be eliminated and tracked in a later sprint. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Code alignment

When it came to code aligning the dozens of UI Shell/Global Navigation components I designed, attention to every pixel of detail would in theory benefit the UX designers and engineers downstream.

To achieve total alignment nirvana, I spent 2-3 months in our Storybook environment examining every aspect of the navigation components’ code/stylesheets, in browser code inspectors, and on Webex calls with the lead engineer.

I even included the rendering glitches and CSS quirks in the designed components. Yes, I am that thorough. 😎

CSS quirks from code intentionally recreated in component design. User pop-up menu. Left, desktop; right, mobile.

Inspecting the user pop-up menu (when clicking their avatar in the toolbar): left, the desktop version which appears immediately beneath the avatar; right, the mobile version is a modal sheet which slides up from the bottom of the screen and casts a focus overlay across the rest of the screen.

For the desktop version, the tiny arrow which normally points at the avatar above, in code was an 8px white square, rotated 45 degrees. So that’s exactly how it was built and named in my Figma component.

For the mobile version, the developed sheet still had a border-radius for the bottom corners, partially revealing the overlay. So again, for better or worse, this behaviour was replicated in the components, purely for alignment sake, which could then be tracked via a ticket during a future sprint.

Documentation (prototype)

While we did need to explain every nuance of this component in excruciating verbosity, to be honest, much of that was purely for posterity, as designers and developers prefer to be shown than told.

So as often as possible, diagrams and illustrations served show. Check out a prototype of the component documentation (external link to Figma):

Check out the prototype for a sense of the documentation style.

Patterns

Overall, the patterns pillar ran somewhat independent from the regular Agile sprints; aside from defining basic stages of progress, the timing of each was simply too nebulous. Each finished when it finished.

Discovery

The leading phases for defining/documenting each pattern involved two steps:

  • Seek out and compile examples of said patterns existing within current products
  • Conduct basic UX reference research via published literature (N/N Group, Baymard Institute, etc.)
  • Show comparisons and contrast with other enterprise design systems
Excerpt from the UI Shell/Global Navigation pattern

Authoring

A basic gallery of the collected examples alongside the research is published for each pattern in a central Miro board, and participants across multiple teams are invited to discuss.

Feedback was then processed and discussed internally by the Design System team and a preliminary policy drafted, including creating any necessary illustrations or diagrams.

On a side but related note, while working on a number of patterns, I matured the team’s existing diagram illustration style.

Publishing

The entirety was presented centrally once more to collect final feedback before formatting and officially publishing.

The CMS-based web publisher required old-school exporting of web-optimised images and a lengthy formatting process.

The site was only published once per sprint, meaning new articles or updates needed meticulous planning to hit those deadlines.

As mentioned earlier, building and maintaining multiple instances of the documentation proved grossly inefficient, so we began migrating all documentation to reside inside their respective pages within the Figma library documents.

This allowed immediate updates at any time and a single source of truth directly adjacent to the content being described (in addition to allowing live elements in prototype view). 👍

Examples from List Pages pattern

Many times, especially in data-rich corporate environments, software must display lists of various types.

To help the many product teams align on some standards, I identified a handful of core use cases, applied general UX research for best practices, and authored the pattern content.

While the above examples were in progress, simpler, low-fidelity versions helped instruct the engineers about how to build templates. Interestingly, they had no trouble translating the super simple style into existing components.

Figma ambassador

The organisation began a mass transition from Sketch to Figma just as I arrived.

Fortuitous, as without a company-issued computer, I could not access their software installer nor company Sketch licence. Figma, however limited me not.

As a power user, I volunteered for their transition ambassador program, where I spent time:

  • Fielding questions in a UX team chat (yes, the same hundreds of teammates)
  • Demonstrating best practices
  • Contributing to training and helpful resources
  • Attending weekly ambassador meetings
  • Attending personalised training directly from Figma’s design advocates
  • Expediting Design System (components) transition from Sketch

Findings and insights

In contrast with the earlier process failures, these most certainly do contain some personal biases from my own experiences.

  • Some highly visible product teams carried on as if immune to alignment efforts, in turn influencing other, smaller teams to also diverge from defined standards.
    • Perhaps some manner of certification accountable to leadership would persuade more teams to participate in the design system.
    • Some of these divergences were then submitted back to the Design System team as contributions, thinking they would simply overwrite established standards. This worsened inconsistencies and complicated alignment efforts.
  • Many of the design system efforts were targeted only towards desktop users and layouts, procrastinating mobile for “later”
    • My contributions always included a minimum of mobile, tablet, and desktop deliverables.
    • I discovered a number of undesirable results from developers implementing their best guess in the absence of design guidance.
    • I repeatedly advocated in our DS team roundtables for at least mobile standards in addition to desktop, to a fairly unreceptive audience from leadership and those with greatest seniority.
  • Some of the Leads on our team, overly eager to win acceptance and adoption from other teams, approved external submissions to the DS without research, discussion, or any kind of QA, resulting in conflicting, redundant, superfluous, or inappropriate features, polluting rather than purifying the system. Better communication/submission process would improve the design system plus inter- and intra-team politics.
  • Clearly some internal, political issues between management and team members caused an exodus of long time employees. Lesser human capital on the team deeply affected our efficacy.
  • Similarly, the organisation clearly favours full-time employees, relegating contractors to second-class citizens with virtually no onboarding, lack of integration with the regular employee teammates, zero resources or privileges to acquire essential hard/software, nor the ability to engage directly with leadership, leading to gross inefficiencies.

Additional design artefacts

A handful of the foundations, or global atoms.

Some of my documentation supporting Do/Don’t illustrations

Legacy Product Design

TLDR; some of my old, publicly released web/digital product work 🤷🏻‍♂️

Before we begin, realise most of the below projects precede the emergence of flat design trends, before responsive web design was standard practice, or even UX/UI as their own distinct fields.

Included here for context in my larger career and to illustrate some sense of design progression or contrast my natural aesthetic against the trends of yesteryear (skeuomorphism, anyone??).



Monkeypaw Games

Project: Branding and websites
Role: Creative Director, Designer, Front-end Developer
Team: <10
Environment: Remote
Key Skills: Photoshop, Illustrator, Brand Identity, Web design, HTML, CSS
Summary: Creating a teaser website for display during development of a full e-commerce site, plus establish corporate branding/identity.

Monkeypaw Games approached me first in need of a new website to promote its line of digital game releases on the Playstation Store, and as a company based in Japan, it marked my first international project*. A secondary objective to re-imagine the logo and branding lurked in the bushes, as their interim identity frankly looked the result of too casual a black Sharpie on napkin.

Die first, resurrect and live later

Monkeypaw needed something for visitors to land upon while their more robust site containing an online store and media engine underwent development.

A “tombstone” site back in the day described a single-page website, usually meant as a placeholder or simple informational block to satiate visitors with the basics. No links, tabs, menus or other frills; just the one page.

A surprising cottage industry sprouted in the late 00s supporting this trend, especially favouring new or small businesses wary of investing heavily in an online presence. Ironic for tombstones to represent so many new companies rather than “deceased” 🤷🏻‍♂️

Two discarded concepts. Too literal/grotesque (left) and too whimsical (right).

Curiously, their initial branding centred around a rather kitschy jungle motif instead of something slick and befitting a tech/gaming company. Anyway, a few rounds of sketches led us to the image below; a light-hearted illustration evoking tropical undergrowth and Incan ornamentation. …because monkeys?

Left: My quick sketch
Right: the fully illustrated final UI

Rebranding

I do remember learning from our calls that their starter logo really was hand-drawn…on an inappropriately disposable substrate no less. Disposable indeed.

Because of illegibility at small sizes and an unrefined appearance, the simians bookending “MonkeyPaw” had but a single redeeming quality: its one colour reproducibility. It otherwise absolutely misfired as the image of a fresh gaming upstart whose products all lived on digital storefronts.

Going back to the drawing board, something much more edgy–literally in your face–emerged.

Left: The actual logo, shown in the brand’s black and red colours.
Right: Alternate photo-textured motifs using the logo’s shapes as masks.

In addition to the standard black and red branding colours, the new logo allowed contrasting photographic textures masked within the shapes, as shown above right, or displaying the foot as a standalone graphic element.

Somewhere in my vast collection of sketchbooks lie a cornucopia of progress sketches, however their location remains a mystery…for now.

The accompanying word mark can be seen in my web examples below.

Reincarnated web experiences

Beyond the tombstone, we eventually released a full website. Primarily a destination for fans and customers to gather news or other information about the company’s products, for the first five years it existed as a non-responsive, “classic” website (see below), courtesy of other designers/agencies.

Early versions of the desktop only website. Note these sport an alternate logo and word mark, courtesy of another designer.

Only when 2015 came around did the site blossom into a fully responsive, multi-device offering. Shown below with my layouts, logo and word mark. Note the mobile (phone) version is intentionally truncated to display alongside its counterparts; some repetitive content not shown.

My responsive layouts, plus the logo and word mark. No disparagement intended to the previous designers, but these all display an obviously higher degree of professional TLC.

* Technically, I joined a project in the late 90s with a Canadian company, but do not consider it part of my professional canon 👍


Bardo Entertainment

Project: Website, pitch decks 
Role: Creative Director, Designer
Team: <10
Environment: On-site in San Francisco Bay Area, California
Key Skills: Photoshop, UX/UI, Web design, HTML, CSS
Summary: A small tech company website (Bardo) aimed at delivering community-focused portal and B2B partner program sites, primarily to the gaming industry.

Freshly transplanted in the San Francisco Bay Area during the late aughts, this marks one of my first freelance projects in the area, spearheaded by my contacts in the video game industry and online game developer Bardo Entertainment.

Bardo hired me to design and pitch a massive growth project for their online community and gamification platform. We also partnered with enterprise web software company, OneSite, who developed much of the back-end technology.

Despite IE6 chucking its notorious wrenches into cross-browser compatibility for years, we wanted to include a few “cutting edge” web techniques (for 2009), such as massive, floating and overlapping layers and translucent elements, mostly for projecting some pizazz and technical prowess, given the site’s otherwise simple presentation.

Web browsers generally didn’t support 24-bit PNG yet, forcing us to adopt 8-bit GIFs and PNGs with their inherent jaggies and dithering effects familiar to anyone who might have played SNES games back in the 90s.

The Bardo “phoenix” in the background helps funnel the viewer to the centre and then downwards through the content. This let us streamline and prioritise the information, giving users just what they need, nothing more or less.


Sega of America, SegaNerds

Project: Website, pitch decks 
Role: Creative Director, Designer
Team: <10
Environment: On-site in San Francisco Bay Area, California
Key Skills: Photoshop, UX/UI, Web design, HTML, CSS
Summary: A reinvention of Sega’s own community-facing presence while also building a network of third-party partner/affiliate sites under its umbrella.

A joint effort with Bardo Entertainment and Sega of America to improve their community outreach program both with their everyday users and also fans running their own sites, blogs, forums, etc.

We partnered with OneSite, a provider of enterprise-level front- and back-end solutions, especially for social media, which includes blog and forum features, but the platform’s biggest draw was its community gamification; giving users points for various activities, redeemable for exclusive gaming swag or digital goodies.

The plan included migrating Sega’s existing site, blogs and forums to OneSite’s platform, and then invite select fans to migrate their sites to sit alongside Sega’s official offering. Post launch, additional game studios and tiers of fan sites were scheduled for inclusion into the network, exercising common templates while also featuring each organisation’s unique branding, staff, and voices.

Shown above is an example pitch of “SegaNerds”, the world’s most popular unofficial Sega site, as it might look on the OneSite platform circa 2010. Note that I took liberties with an original typeset logo and custom illustration, since at the time, their site was essentially a WordPress blog with some stolen sprite art plus the actual Sega logo.

Admittedly, by today’s standards, the web portal style might be a bit busy, however it still represents an approach to organising heaps of content into a single page, in this case unifying a blog, forum, and the new platform’s content all in a single touchpoint.

Although now offline, a not insignificant portion of the intellectual property is evident in services like Loot Crate.


Nicalis

The deceptively simple, yet responsive site for Nicalis software's head honcho.
The deceptively simple, yet responsive site for Nicalis software’s head honcho.

Project: Website 
Role: Designer, Front-end developer
Team: <20
Environment: Remote
Key Skills: Photoshop, UX/UI, Web design, HTML, CSS
Summary: A companion site for the CEO of an indie gaming company to do fan-direct PR and other random communication.

Nicalis is a darling of the indie gaming scene, amassing a huge fanbase with their niche titles released across virtually every platform. The studio’s boss came to me around 2014 looking for a way to make personal announcements and connect directly with those fans in ways exceeding Twitter’s capabilities.

Using Tumblr as the base CMS platform, additional requirements and features such as Twitter integration, AMA events, and multi-device responsiveness were designed and implemented.

The graphic above shows screen grabs of the site as it exists today (latest post 2017), replete with rendering anomalies either the result of modifications made by the client post release or changes to the hosting platform/browsers over time. 

Curiously, instead of any title imagery, he opted to render his name in simple Japanese kana and live HTML text. Whatever the thinking behind it, it remained a popular destination far longer than Tumblr itself.

Sadly, no static renderings or wireframes of the pre-release development process exist, as most of the UX design work happened directly in the browser while I coded it, but the above does closely resemble the product I delivered. I may at some point recreate assets to further illustrate the process.

Custom CMS Product Design Case Study

TLDR; an online gaming news site and community I’ve led the building and rebuilding half a dozen times since 2005.

Project: Web-based app, custom-built CMS for online media outlet
Role: Director of Product & Design
Client: GoNintendo
Team: 5–40
Environment: Fully remote
Key Skills: User research, market research, mobile first, wire framing, Figma, design system, brand design, documentation, code alignment, leadership
Website: gonintendo.com
Summary: An iterative web project spanning more than fifteen years, starting from the reskin of a humble WordPress-based site to its rebranding and replacement by a custom-built, responsive CMS…twice thrice.

Overview

GoNintendo has been the world’s top destination dedicated to Nintendo gaming news and community since 2005. Having undergone six major product launches in that time—all under my direction, this case study will document the most recent launch from March 2022 following an internal tragedy which forced a site hiatus for the better part of a year.

For a deeper look at the history and previous releases, including my biggest career failure, read my article here

The Objectives

While we had previously built two completely custom CMS front- and back-end solutions replete with a content publisher and admin interface, the latest incarnation brought several new challenges that meant we could not simply recycle past efforts.

The outgoing site—while still highly capable—remains a testament to yesterday and simply not up to the challenges facing devices in 2022, supporting a team of writers or the structural differences in presenting feature content versus news.

Tragedy tends to put things into perspective. What worked yesterday was suddenly unfit for tomorrow.

– Aaron Hoffmann

Where things were

  • A fifth-generation system that while efficient, was built to support a feature set suffering from years of accumulated bloat
  • Fully responsive, but built to serve a largely desktop-based audience
  • Supported multiple domains, users and permissions groups, but the largely code-based editor resulted in huge output discrepancies and rendering issues between authors, even after training
  • Almost exclusively focused on the news feed in a blog-like format, at the expense of promoting editorial and exclusive content

Where we needed to go

  • New content mix, new layout and database/information architecture. Post-tragedy, the CEO’s vision for the site changed from mostly news to a larger emphasis on editorial and exclusive content.
    • New layout could not completely betray the passionate user base’s expectations. We learned this the hard way once before.
  • Massively streamline the feature list. Not minimal viable product, but it required a serious discussion of priorities amongst leadership. In terms of overall feature quantity, most of the past would be left behind.
  • Mobile first. For realz this time. Based on traffic analytics, we would for the first time be building for a mostly (80%) mobile audience. Compared to ten years prior, mobile technologies and expectations evolved substantially.
  • More organised editorial review workflows. The team would be expanding ten-fold to realise the new site’s direction and needed completely different technology and UX to support everyone.
  • A publishing tool that forced consistency between all authors. Expecting dozens of new staff to be or quickly become well-versed in HTML/CSS enough to all produce compliant content is unreasonable. Needs to work for beginners and experts alike.

The Work

Of course, with me, projects never begin with wireframes, largely because like developers, I prefer to avoid wasting time or expensive rework as much as possible.

While some back-end technology pieces began immediately and in parallel with design due to time constraints, I directed the project follow a structured UX methodology.

Define

  • gather requirements from CEO/leadership
  • translate requirements into discrete goals, including feature set
  • establish timeline and roadmap for launch and post-launch
  • define personas and essential new workflows

Research

  • conduct user interviews
    • understand usage patterns
    • understand device usage
  • outline essential workflow diagrams and matrices
  • competitive research and analysis

Structure

  • created design system
    • tokenised colours, sizes, etc
    • all components
  • began branding / identity refresh
  • authored documentation / style guide
    • targeting devs and future advertising partners

Design

  • produced wireframes and prototypes
  • facilitated weekly check-ins with leadership and design/development
  • completed re-branding efforts

Validate

  • weekly check-ins with leadership and dev lead, including demos and presentation of progress
  • conducted regular user interviews
    • A/B testing
    • Group interviews
    • Individual interviews
    • guided and unguided sessions
  • validated code against UX schematics with dev lead
    • my target was 80% accuracy by launch

Repeat

  • analysed/ synthesised feedback into actionable revisions
  • weekly sprints

Definition

We conducted a series of preliminary meetings to define the goals, then identify and triage the feature list, and finally establish realistic delivery windows for launch and beyond.

Defining basic IA, core feature set, personas, and a publishing user flow.
Persona matrix and publishing user flow
Working out the onboarding user flow and permissions, accounting for previously onboarded accounts and brand new people.
Defining the semantic structures early, to simplify design output later, but also to allow development to begin creating basic templates and test code with semi-accurate placeholders.

Research

We then conducted market/competitive research, partly to discover whether similar solutions existed but also to understand what our target audience is experiencing elsewhere, aka Jakob’s Law.

We spent considerable time researching and analysing our traffic data. Surprising almost no one, our device demographics nearly flipped since our previous iteration (built 2013-15), going from roughly 70% desktop to 80% mobile, 18% desktop, and the remainder filled by tablet and non-traditional devices.

Admin headaches

When it came to the publisher, the single greatest struggle in past iterations was training new users how to use the bloody thing, because until recently, good WYSIWYG editors still often relied on knowing enough HTML to tweak/fix things to achieve the desired result.

Plus, even if we could get the average person to rudimentary HTML fluency, each writer would still format their content however the cosmos struck them that day, aka zero consistency.

Rudimentary example of a block editor. Authors can easily and consistently build articles without coding. Simple options shown in the first header’s contextual flyout.

The lead developer and I each independently brought in the concept of a block editor, basically a component library for writers.

By stacking pre-made content blocks (eg headers, image galleries, pullquotes, etc.), each with predefined styling and simplified options, users would never need to muck about in the code, and would all produce identically formatted, valid HTML entries.

Ironically, WordPress introduced a similar feature in 2018, and though we had no interest in reverting to the platform we ditched over a decade earlier, their Gutenberg block editor did represent the direction we wanted to go, just without all its complexity and fluff.

To determine what blocks we would need, we first brainstormed a list, and scraped the database for 50k past stories to generate a word cloud of common tags used by authors, and then compared the two.

It was then just a matter of prioritising (or alphabetising) the final collection, much like the arrangement of keys on an English-based keyboard. We chose organisation by usage over alphabetisation, as not every writer would know our vocab for the block they needed.

The complete list of blocks available to the writing teams.

Structure

Building an entire web app from scratch with an extremely tight delivery window meant that feeling our way in the dark was not an option. Unlike past iterations which allowed organic progress, highly collaborative efforts between design and development was critical to success this time around.

To that end, though we had some very, very rudimentary sketches to illustrate the overall concept and vision from the Define and Research stages, as development set its groundwork with various frameworks and libraries, I began building out our design system, starting with the essentials.

To save time further (ie two birds with one stone), I compiled and documented all components and design system elements as a style guide as they were built.

Design system foundations

As always, my preferred design system rests upon an atomic, 16-point soft grid. All facets of the system from font sizes to spacing relate to multiples or fractions of 16.

Happy to explain that in greater detail…just reach out.

The most basic elements like font scales, colour grades, and tokens came first, followed by layout grids, buttons and input fields.

With Tailwind CSS as our presentational foundation, we also relied upon their official Heroicons collection to cover our limited iconography needs for the external facing front end.

For the block editor within the admin panel, we relied on a combination of official and custom icons inspired by FontAwesome 6.

Additional examples of more developer focused anatomical diagrams and notes:

Rebranding efforts

For a major relaunch not only of the digital product, but also a renewed vision of the services offered within it, we also wanted to introduce a refreshed branding to reflect a resurrected spirit.

Ok, enough with the “re-” words.

Some of the branding exploration. 1, one of our past logos. 2, the revised version. Third column, partial showing of commercial typeface options. Fourth column, my custom-designed typeface options. 3, the final selected lock-up.

Without exhausting the long history, we explored a number of options, but decided upon a simple streamlining of a past, fan-favourite identity.

For this, my goal was to reduce overall geometry for maximal use across devices and sizes.

Although we explored a number of commercial typefaces for our word mark, we ultimately used one I completely custom designed via Adobe Illustrator.

Design

Our goals included not just a responsive, public-facing front end, but a full admin panel and publisher, plus the new identity.

Public-facing

Given our early discussions, competitive analyses, etc.; we quickly settled into a viable mobile concept as our flagship and then expanding upon it to create desktop and tablet versions.

Early, low-medium fidelity mobile menu prototype options test:

Working prototypes of initial mobile menu options considered. External link to Figma.

The desktop navigation proved a more formidable hurdle, as the additional real estate allowed for a much wider variety of options. We ultimately presented these options in A/B testing for user validation (further below).

The remainder of the public-facing UI design mostly revolved around how each of the publisher’s story blocks would render across devices.

Examples sorting out other UX work like feature user flows and device-specific prototypes:

Ad placement

Ad placement required us to consider both the intrusiveness impact to users while balancing business needs to pay bills.

But the larger UX conundrum was how to intersperse ads given the user behaviour we discovered in earlier research.

In the past, standard pagination (click Next or Previous to load a new page) allowed us to place ads in consistent and specific locations within a layout; something highly desirable to ad companies.

However, based on our initial user research and their usage patterns, we explored using infinite scrolling instead of static pagination. This added several issues:

  • Infinite scrolling only allows a single masthead (most valuable, main header) ad once, and then lesser value ads between content as the user scrolls. This means considerably less revenue.
  • Most ads use iframes and loads of javascript, which significantly reduce performance with each instance, a serious problem for mobile (read: 80% of our) users.
    • this is further compounded by the media-heavy content our editors already post
  • Some users reported hating (automatically loading) infinite scrolling, so we needed to find a solution that allowed the freedom to peruse content endlessly but also remain purely opt-in.
Given the high level templates for both desktop (left) and mobile, we also needed to account for the necessary evil of ad placement (yellow blocks).

As visible in the low-fidelity wireframes above, once we identified the main sections per layout across the app, we could identify the prime locations for ads.

When it came to infinite scrolling, to solve for the desired opt-in behaviour, avoid performance hits, and a consistent placement for advertisers, we:

  • Made loading infinite content a simple button/link at the bottom of each block.
  • Ad placement only affects the first fifteen articles; the initial load of content.
  • Users see the same amount of ads as a single static pagination, have freedom to load additional content as desired, and advertisers gain their reliable placement. 🥇

Admin panel & publisher

Having defined the necessary publisher blocks earlier and their external-facing appearances, we needed more detailed design and UX attention given to the space our staff would be interacting with the most.

As shown below, we began with really bare bones wireframes, mostly to establish the base functionality, necessary fields, database structures, etc. Everything was essentially a single column with tiny block management buttons hugging the left side; with a stationary, floating panel along the bottom of the user’s screen.

The main UX challenges here:

  • assert consistency/logic to field arrangement
  • provide users a preview of the block content when appropriate
  • provide users enough help/context for each block’s functionality
  • make each block visibly unique/identifiable when scrolling through a longer list of them
  • simplify block management tools while providing a more robust selection of functions
  • simplify the footer contents

We performed a rigorous testing of the interface, blocks, options, etc. over the course of several weeks to refine and optimise the UX for maximum productivity and usability.

The solutions (shown in image):

  • a two-column layout was chosen; data left, options/preview right.
  • previews for blocks like images or text appear in the right column, immediately next to the input for side-by-side comparison
  • explanatory text resides beneath and/or placeholders inside most fields
  • the left margin was repurposed for its identifying icon, which can easily be scanned whilst scrolling
  • each block has a management menu next to its title, with greater options to re-order, add, remove, etc.
  • footer was simplified to a single dropdown, allowing the interface to remain consistent across browsers, display sizes, and independent of the addition/removal of blocks

Our block editor brilliantly achieved its goal of a large, diverse team all publishing consistent content and with virtually zero training.

Aaron Hoffmann

When it came to other areas of the admin area, we again streamlined wherever possible.

The dashboard underwent several iterations, ultimately formatted with cards to present writers/editors all of their necessary stats or to-dos at a glance.

It wasn’t always this organised.

And finally, to show a bit of the other scaffolding, flows, and IA behind the scenes of behind the scenes, in this case, features available to moderator and admin personas.

Orange buttons/text on and adjacent to wireframes indicate notes for design/development.

Branding

Honestly, we kept most of the identity work internal throughout the process until launch, relying more upon leadership approvals than user validation or external focus groups.

We felt confident with this approach for one reason: as mentioned earlier, we based the new branding upon our most popular past identity, and our primary aim was to reduce complexity while remaining faithful to the source.

The overwhelmingly positive reaction upon release validated this decision.

Validate

Our validation phase relied on two primary sources: direct user feedback via interviews and sessions; and code review.

We relied upon the former to ensure the layouts, navigation, etc worked as expected and that we delivered on users’ needs.

The latter, in order to reach our defined goal of 80% compliance by launch, largely relied on my personal review of production code and comparing it to the design specs, and then prioritising for the most salient or efficacious cost/benefit ratio.

User focused

For user interviews, due to Covid and our internationally-distributed team, all sessions were conducted remotely.

Users would be presented anything from low-fidelity wireframes to working coded demos. Notes taken during sessions were processed and findings presented in our weekly leadership and development check-ins.

Below, an example of a medium-fidelity A/B prototype I designed, meant to capture user feedback regarding possible desktop navigation constructs.

Note the lovingly crafted micro-interactions and transitions intended to make each option maximally desirable. ❤️

Prototype designed for A/B user testing of desktop navigation options. External link to Figma.

In this particular case, after user testing, we ultimately pursued the “Mega Menu” approach:

  • Amongst users who expressed a preference, they strongly favoured either Traditional menus or the Slide-in, and strongly disliked the other.
  • While fewer people so strongly preferred it as the other two, nobody disliked the Mega Menu. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Code focused

Often this process involved excerpting the Github repository or browser inspector, then using Figma to create aides that illustrate deltas, issues, or present rationale for needing certain code revisions.

In the below example, a slight deviance from the desktop grid spec meant our app’s massive tomes of text would be less readable, and in fact many users commented on it despite being unable to articulate precisely why.

UX pros ought to understand classic typesetting principles; font size, column width, and leading are a balancing act with algorithmic underpinnings for ideal legibility, meaning this was simple to identify and fix.

Release

After teasing on social media for months prior, we publicly released right on time; precisely one year after going offline (what I dubbed our antiversary), to nearly universal acclaim, surprise and delight.

Thanks to our pre-release user testing, we anticipated the commonest constructive comments, and announced plans to address them in successive patches in the near future alongside our relaunch.

Results

  • Released all planned features on time.
  • Targeted 80% accuracy of code to design specs, achieved over 95%.
  • Vastly improved quality and consistency of staff output, while simplifying publishing workflows and virtually eliminated the need for any training.
  • Improved user onboarding, in reduced steps required and time needed from register to usable account.
  • High praise from users, partners, and even competition for both the product and our fresh take on a beloved branding from the past.
  • Exceedingly few unanticipated “issues”.

Obstacles and learnings

  • 突貫工事. Honestly, the largest hurdle we faced was time. What would normally require 1-2 years to build had just four months (plus one upfront for planning) start to finish.
    • While the Product, UX, and development leads found a number of efficiencies to exploit, allowing us to perform some steps in parallel rather than purely sequential from planning to design to dev, a solid methodology was what truly allowed us to meet our targets.
    • Deadlines were what they were; sometimes walking a short plank is unavoidable, but given talented resources and a process, success is achievable.
  • User testing and research was invaluable. Not only did it provide insights during the planning stages leading to less design and development in production, it allowed us to rapidly narrow focus after our initial builds and iterate to release candidate.
  • A design system (including documentation) is worth multiple times its weight in gold, even for projects below the enterprise threshold. Without one, UX debt will seep into and dampen any project.
  • An organisation’s UX maturity can make or break a project, especially the more limited its resources of time, money, or talent. Being able to directly affect this from a Director level was a convenient win, but having worked with projects and companies suffering a lack of UX maturity, the contrast is black and white.