How To Transform a Complex CMS into a Fast, Efficient Tool for News Editors?
About
Articu is a Content Management System (CMS) designed to empower editors with speed and efficiency, enabling them to publish breaking news and articles faster than their competition. This case study dives into the design journey, highlighting the research, planning, and final design of a system tailored to meet the unique needs of news editors.
Introduction: Setting the Stage
The Problem
News editors face immense pressure to be the first to publish breaking news. Current CMS platforms fail to deliver the speed and user-friendliness required to stay ahead in the competitive news industry.
Articu’s Goal: build a CMS that streamlines the publishing process, reduces complexity, and boosts both user and business outcomes.
Key challenges included:
A lengthy, cumbersome article form
Difficulties in uploading images
Lack of real-time data
Intuitive navigation and organization issues
More Content, More Revenue: Articu's Goal
More content will attract more users to visit the website in order to get more views on every page. When the website has more views there are more ads, more ads = revenue.
Affinity Mapping
Organized User Insights
Affinity Mapping helped group similar feedback and observations from user interviews, making it easier to identify recurring themes and patterns in the editors' workflows and pain points.
Prioritized Pain Points
By clustering related challenges, the process highlighted the most critical issues affecting both users and business goals, guiding the focus toward impactful solutions like simplifying the article form and improving upload speed.
Empathy Mapping
Deeper Understanding: Helped to see the editors’ experiences, frustrations, and goals from their perspective.
User-Centered Focus: Highlighted what users feel, think, and need, guiding design decisions to solve real problems.
Better Solutions: Ensured the system addressed emotional and practical user needs
User Journey Map
To visualize editors' workflows and identify friction points.
Competitive Research
The competitive research gave fresh ideas and best practices for CMS design. By combining insights from editor interviews and online research, I identified key players in the CMS field. While they weren’t direct competitors, analyzing their offerings helped us understand what features and approaches resonate most with users.
Planning: Translating Insights into Solutions
At the planning stage, formulated "How Might We" (HMW) questions to address user pain points and meet business goals. For example:
HMW makes uploading content faster.
HMW simplifies the article form for essential fields only.
HMW provides real-time data for user engagement.
Defined KPIs, including:
User Engagement:
Users will be able to upload more articles and news reports per day
Time spent on the article input screen decreased by 10%
Task Success KPIs:News updates will be published faster on the website.
Time on task.
Error rate during task completion
Usability:System Usability Scale (SUS) score.
Cognitive load time (time taken to understand interface).
Interaction success rate.
Effective work:10% fewer calls for the CMS support team
The number of items per day will increase by 10%
Fewer grammatical errors in articles
Design: Bringing the Vision to Life
The design began by thinking about the features this system needs to help users achieve their goals. First, I braindumping and wrote down everything that came to mind. In addition, creating a mind map helped focus more on the most important features for the users.
Next, Before started working on the final design, I used low-fidelity sketches and mapped out user flows and a sitemap to create a logical and intuitive structure. The focus was on tasks like uploading breaking news, editing articles, and managing multimedia content. In the beginning, I used Crazy 8s sketching sessions, brainstorming potential solutions. Key outcomes included:
Drag-and-drop image uploader: Eliminated multi-file complexity
Simplified article form: Condensed to essential fields, with smart defaults
Real-time analytics dashboard: Gave editors immediate insights into user engagement
Applying visual design
Once understood how other systems work and organized all the data from my research finally started working on the visual aesthetics of the main dashboard and the main flow of uploading an article to the website Below are the finalized designs for the dashboard, a site section, the article form, and the push notification system.
System Dashboard
The home page of the system is where the user gets access to the most critical information concerning the website's efficiency, retrieve previously utilized files and pages, and have immediate access to essential duties such as posting current events, articles, multimedia, and recipes.
Site Page
All the articles that related to a section on the website. In this example, you can see all the articles and files that are related and published in the Breaking News section and subsection Middle East.
Uploading Article to the website
This design flow demonstrated how the users can upload a quick breaking news article and a full article. The pop-up page is for uploading content as fast as possible, even if the editor doesn’t have much information to share. The full-form page design is for cases where the editors want to upload a full article.
Push Notification System
On these pages, the user can send push notifications to all users who are signed up for notifications from the app. The editors select the article they want to send a push about, write a quick message, and add an image to the push notification.
Final Takeaways: Designing with Empathy, Simplicity, and Impact
Articu demonstrates how user-centered design can transform complex workflows into efficient, intuitive experiences. This project was a testament to the power of empathy, research, and iterative design in solving real-world problems. With Articu, news editors can focus on what matters most: the content.
What have I learned from this project?
Listening is Everything
Talking to the editors and understanding their struggles made it clear how important it is to get into the user's shoes. By hearing their pain points, you were able to come up with solutions that made their lives easier.Start Simple, Build Smart
Sketching out quick ideas and improving them step by step showed you that you don’t need to have all the answers right away. Iterating on designs made the final system much more practical and user-friendly.Users and Business Can Both Win
You learned that a good design isn’t just about making users happy—it’s about finding that sweet spot where their needs match the company’s goals, like faster publishing leading to more articles and higher revenue.
Working on this project taught me a lot about the struggle of news and content editors not just to get the most interesting stories but also the technical problems and how can I make their lives better and focus on what matters - the story.
Next Steps: Testing and Gathering Data to Improve
With the design and main flow ready, the next step is to test the system and gather key data to ensure it’s working well for the editors. We’ll focus on measuring:
How long does it take to publish an article or breaking news compared to the old system?
The number of calls the CMS support team receives in the first two months, compared to before.
The number of errors users encounter during this time.
These tests will provide data on how the system is performing, in addition to usability. With these insights, We’ll refine the system to address any issues and make it even better. We’ll also look at adding new features to help editors work faster and create diverse content types, which will ultimately boost user engagement and revenue for the business.