Durable content management for a scrappy newsroom
Project: CMS redesign
Role: UX research, product design
MIT Technology Review: Vanessa Scopino (director of product), Emily Waggoner, Jenn Kappel (UI/UX designers), Jason Lewicki (senior software engineer)
The product development team at MIT Technology Review couldn't find a headless front-end content management system product to work on top of the existing Drupal datastore in 2015, so we decided to build our own, led by senior software engineer Jason Lewicki. The result was Rhino, a custom CMS built with PHP and fully supported inhouse.
During the life of Rhino 1.0, we extended editorial features and stood up a variety of custom integrations, including video players, ad tech, and a meter and paywall. As a small team of 8 supporting dozens of editors, marketers, salespeople, and event staff, we built it for speed. It was a reliable, resilient platform. But the enhanced usability and elegant interface it deserved weren’t in the MVP.
A second pass at our inhouse custom CMS brought with it significant improvements in usability and performance — in addition to the resilience and rich feature set our editors had come to expect.
When the decision was made to redesign the site in 2018, we jumped at the chance to perfect the tool that we and our editors had come to appreciate and rely on. We wrapped into the new requirements some two years of backlog requests and user research gathered by Emily Waggoner, Vanessa Scopino, and myself from our editorial and marketing teams, and we redesigned Rhino in parallel with the front end during the course of 2018. Jason refactored extensively and rebuilt large portions of Rhino using React.
Rhino 2.0 featured a simplified taxonomy, natural-language interface copy, and tools designed for editors to write and publish stories (of course), as well as manage and curate editorial content on the site in multiple locations in a variety of formats. We restructured the nav and collapsed unnecessary page heirarchies, and retired outdated features.
We took the opportunity to integrate as many user-led insights and success-driven features as possible; we used SEO recommendations as placeholder text in content fields on the story builder screen, added word-counts to headline fields, and reduced the number of steps required to initiate a story before getting right into writing it. Wherever possible, we pushed for clarity, speed, ease of use, and simplicity.