Visualizing workflows to make the flow work

Projects: Workflow working group, customer support system

Role: UX research, workflow, facilitator, UX writing

MIT Technology Review: Emily Luong (art director), Tate Ryan-Mosley (reporter, data and audio), Rosemary Kelly (director of audience development), Molly Frey (director of software engineering), Vanessa Scopino (director of product), Doreen Adger (senior vice president, marketing and consumer revenue), Tim Borton (circulation and print production manager) 

I’m interested in setting up tools and creating processes that optimize the effort of our teams and improve the value of our products. As James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, wrote: “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” The strength of our systems determines the strength of the work we produce.

I’ve seen this succeed using two techniques: meeting teams where they are, and improving discrete components of systems and habits they already use to create high-quality products; and introducing novel workflows to move team habits and expectations in a better direction.

Multitracking our editorial approach

Good journalism is hard work. The assembly, trafficking, and management of the work our journalists create is no easy feat, either. Without an intentional process based on the practical needs of the team, producing editorial content drains resources and morale, and valuable opportunities are missed.

I convened an informal, cross-team working group to consider how MIT Technology Review might improve the way our editorial production workflow serves our content strategy, and what opportunities exist to improve our products by changing how we plan, collaborate on, and produce editorial work. 

It sounds obvious, but it’s not always: we can intentionally design our way out of old systems that don’t work as well as they should.

Right now the newsroom’s editorial content workflow operates on two main tracks: stories intended to be published in the print magazine and digitally, and digital-only. While digital-only stories of various sizes are constantly in production and being published, magazine stories for a particular issue all work toward a single deadline. Chaos often ensues as that deadline hits, and maintaining a high level of quality is difficult.

The result of our working group’s discussions has been a proposal to reconfigure our current workflow by assigning magazine stories to three cohorts, running on parallel production schedules. Stories needing fewer resources or less reliant on breaking news are assigned to the earliest cohort, and can be edited and designed first, and so on; stories can be moved between cohorts as conditions change.

Our ongoing series of proposals include the following:

• Story lifecycles
  Planning, creation, and maintenance

• Timeline models
  Staggered publishing cadence, untethered from print schedules

• Digital tools
  To minimize redundancy in distribution across channels and mediums

• Multi-disciplinary team models
  What talent we need, where best to apply it

Customer feedback is user research

Our most direct channel of user feedback is customer support requests. When readers reach out to us, we can go beyond solving their problems or answering their individual questions and improve our products for everybody. If we do it right, it’s a beneficial exercise in one-on-one relationship building with our customers.

In addition to improving our customer support itself, we used the platform’s reporting features to determine which elements of our site experience were failing, leading directly to product improvements.

We’d been using the customer-support ticket tool HelpScout for some time when I arrived, but it wasn’t working for us; conversations were dropped, important bugs were missed, and customers and team members alike were confused and frustrated. I redesigned the process by which we received and solved customer issues by democratizing the ticketing system — instead of a single point of contact, tickets were assigned based on user-selected categories and delivered to topic experts.

Based on the voice and tone guide I set up, I wrote a series of autoreplies and reusable responses to common issues. I trained the internal team, and when we convinced our fulfillment vendor to take part, we were able to conduct oversight on subscription-related conversation threads that had previously gone into a black hole.