Vox Media Chorus
Case Study
How I used UX design, user research, and product design to launch a CMS and turn it into a SaaS product used by over 350 third-party websites
Role: Senior Content Strategist
Year: 2016 - 2018
Tools: User Interviews, User Research, Figma
Where the project began
Vox Media’s publishing network had its own custom content management named Chorus, which was designed in 2008. As the media landscape changed, so did the needs of the company’s multiple media outlets. Work began on revamping Chrous in the mid-2010s. In 2018, Chorus became a full-fledged software-as-a-service product that Vox Media sold to third-party publishers.
The problem I had to solve
The previous version of Chorus couldn’t keep up with the demands of a modern media company. As Polygon.com’s lead content strategist, I had to work with product designers and other content strategists across Vox Media to understand the needs of multiple publishing teams to create a platform that met most common denominators.
What solutions I came up with
A major component of my work within Chorus was making sure the platform supported an easy way for writers to implement SEO best practices into their stories without slowing down their content workflow.
Design Thinking Process
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Empathize
The previous version of Chorus was slow and wasn’t designed to accommodate many modern features. Through user testing, research, and interviews we learned two of the major pain points were the lack of easy tools to design visually interesting stories and easy-to-use SEO features.
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Define
Chorus had to be fast while also designed in a way that would lead users to naturally discover and use all the tools that were baked into the platform. While some training might be needed, the CMS had to be laid out in a way that allowed users to naturally flow through creating a story, setting up SEO, and designing.
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Ideate
We came up with several workflows that product designers, editors, and content strategists felt made the most sense. We compiled information from multiple publishers to understand their workflows and designed a workflow within Chorus that aimed to meet most needs.
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Prototype
We slowly rolled out access to the updated Chorus to several teams and individual contributors. We wanted to see the difference in speed an efficiency in publishing new stories, but also how easily editors could provide content edits within the platform and update stories.
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Test
While testing, we learned some workflows were being completely ignored. We worked on several updates to the workflow to make sure that writers, even those in a time crunch, could complete all needed steps before publishing stories.
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Repeat
As more users got onboarded to the platform, we eventually sunsetted the old version of Chorus. With the entire company using the new publishing platform, we continually gained ideas for new updates to make publishing easier to use.
Vox Media Chorus
Sitemap Example
One area I worked on specifically was designing a workflow to improve the usage of SEO features.
Chorus was designed to serve up different headlines and story descriptions depending on what platform was displaying the story (natively on owned platforms, on social media cards, and on search engines). I worked to train writers on the importance of using different keywords in each version of this information while providing them with analytics to back up this use case.