Editorial Portal
OVERVIEW
DeckerMed is a digital medical publishing and e-learning platform with life-long learning as a focus.
The purpose of the portal is to provide a shared environment in which all the published content written can be stored, managed and parsed into educational tools.
This task can be challenging as the authors/editors require a quick, seamless transition from the external editing tools that they are used to, to an internal shared environment to better manage the content.
ROLE
Lead Product Designer
User Research, Interaction design,
Prototyping & Testing.
September 2019 - October 2021
Background
DeckerMed is a digital medical publishing and e-learning platform with life-long learning as a focus.
The purpose of the portal is to provide a shared environment in which all the published content written can be stored, managed and parsed into educational tools.
Interviews are the key to innovation
The first step I took was to have interviews with the internal production editorial team to determine their workflow. The main goal at this time was to conduct exploration phases to understand the user difficulties and their needs as well as fullfill business requirements. Authors, editors and production managers were interviewed in an hour time limit gathering crucial data. After concluding our research with internal stakeholders there were a series of design tokens created to justify design decisions, such as user personas, affinity maps and whiteboard sketches. This allowed us to determine the information architecture, interactions and page layouts efficiently
Figure of Publishing process before Portal
Figure of streamlined publishing process with the help of the Editorial Portal
Methodology
To improve the DeckerMed Portal, a user-centered, iterative design procedure for the various phases of the design process was carried out. This allows the design and development team to be invested at all stages.
Their were many advantages of incorporating the Prototyping and Testing phases into the scrum, it allows all team members to be stakeholders in the design creation, allowed for new discoveries and reiterated the user goals in every phase of development
Low fidelity design artifacts are created for an initial design exploration. We also involved the entire editorial team to participate in whiteboard workshops to establish the information architecture. The goal at the end of each workshop was to refine the flow and wireframes to a low fidelity prototype ready for testing
I conducted usability testing sessions with our primary users to validate whether the new designs would solve their problems. A series of tests were created to test the shared editing part of the prototype as well as ease of use.
During the session, I observed how they interacted with the prototype. The usability session revealed that error prevention should be a key focus, as users expressed concern of committing time into writing and losing work.
Validating the designs
Developing the designs
I created my high fidelity mockups in Figma and collaborated with the Front End team to spec out any missing interactions that were not covered in the high fidelity mockups. I conducted a UX review of each front-end ticket that was implemented to ensure it was aligned with the designs before it went live
Collaborative Editing Space - The shared editor is customized to the components and guidelines required to publish a medical review. From a single review an abbreviated high yield, test questions and learning objectives can be parsed and utilized in the various teaching tools. Comments and requests can be tagged in the text with quick links in the smart scrollbar
Review Selection - The authors and editors landing page aims to display their assigned reviews by priority. They can overview which components have been published as well as complete their authoring. For the first iteration we used a turn based system to allow one author in a review at a time. For future development simultaneous collaboration can be explored.
Admin Smartsheets - The main location Production Editorial Managers can monitor publishing progress as well as take action in managing the authors and editors.
A key concept we established was the Health of a Review. New reviews would base their health on the deadline but published reviews cycle through their health based on their publish date and data from an API pull to gather latest guideline updates.
Sign Up - Informative sign up page that gathers data for Production Managers categorize and validate authors and editors
Testing
After the initial beta release a few authors and editors along with internal editorial managers were onboarded to the new portal platform. Two groups of internal stakeholders were taken into account as participants. The first is the Production Editorial team (PE team), the second group was currently contracted authors and editors that agreed to beta test the new editorial portal.
Qualitative data was derived from stakeholder user interviews, heuristic review, and design workshops.
Key Insights made during the interview process:
Inconsistency - Production editorial managers have multiple reviews, graphics and tables in various third party applications and file managers. Time consuming process of piecing together publishing material and parsing teaching tool components
Backlog - New reviews often missing publishing deadline and manual assessment of when older reviews need to be updated
Lack of Transparency - The use of external software tools to accomplish all the collective functionality can lead to numerous concerns such as concurrency control, content management, and usability.
Thematic Analysis
To utilize the data collected for discovery the common themes and challenges that arose among the participants must be analyzed. In the effort to better organize the data collected from the interviews a thematic analysis was conducted by combining Affinity Mapping and Sharon’s Rainbow Spreadsheet.
An initial organization of the affinity notes gathered from the interviews.
The high contrast visualization displays the patterns easily by showing the frequency and similarities of remarks and comments among the participants for further analysis.
Insights
Three main design considerations were identified to be the optimal evolution for this iteration of the DeckerMed Portal:
Integrated onboarding of new collaborators: allowing for authors to access the interface and proceed with content creation without delay.
Automating manual PE admin tasks: ability to assign and message within admin smartsheets, filters and additional actions
Optimizing author ownership of publishing tasks: organizing and displaying available reviews by priority(health).
Known problems
Visibility of system status
Particularly the lack of clarity in terms or the users review status on their dashboard. There is still a learning curve pertaining to the turn taking shared editing status, simplifying the interface further is suggested.
Flexibility and efficiency of us
For the first iteration the priority was given to error prevention, but with that accomplished further tools for the admin on the spreadsheets that allow customization and flexibility for author actions on reviews can be explored.
Future Goals
The goal of identifying the main areas of focus for the two user groups, Production Editorial team members as well as collaborators was successful within its limitations and can easily be expanded upon for future research and evaluation. The next steps for the future would be to test the prototype further and iterate the design process with a more thorough evaluation phase.