Use Case

The existing site suffered from inconsistencies in lay-out, typography, color, information architecture, content hierarchy, and user flow. This ultimately impacted the site visitor, which analytics showed were getting lost consistently. To remedy this, my team and I worked to standardize the layout and styling of the site, and to provide training and documentation to content producers to adhere to best practices when creating pages.

Challenges

• Derive a standard set of functional AEM components and page templates to
• Enable content creators to create and publish pages themselves, without having to rely on development colleagues
• Serve as starting points for content creators to add or subtract components when authoring new pages
• Improve the site information architecture by embedding taxonomical information in the components and templates
• Simplify content authoring through a plug-and-play model
• Offer content creators recommendations on what components and templates to use based on the situation
• Deliver instruction materials to Red Cross's content creators on best practices for leveraging the new components and templates, as well as teaching them how to move of visitors to and through the donation funnel

Method

1. Interview content publishers about their existing publication practices
2. Create standardized components and publishing rules

UX Outcome

We were able to scale content authoring and improved publication efficiency by removing the need for development to be involved, reducing publication time by weeks.

We were able to unify the site appearance, behavior, and information architecture of three formerly disparate sites. Over time, this resulted in noticeable improvement in navigation by the site visitors.

This work included creating a set of pages to serve as models for the Red Cross content creation team. It also included education and consulting services that I performed.