Content type

• Media
  • Image
  • Video
  • Chart
  • Audio – consider combining with File, depending on the use cases.
  • File
  • Poll
  • Wild Card
  • Web – combine Webservice & WebResource. Any external URLs and assets that needs to be held inside the CMS. Consider removing this as a content type and use simple embed within the text editor.
  • Flash (legacy)
• Pages
  • News Story
  • Blog Post
  • SlideShow
  • Partner Story
  • Advertorial
  • Press Release
  • Wire Story
  • Quiz Entry
• Sections
  • Franchise
  • Creator
  • Person
  • Content types below can be considered as simple tags, if there are no other metadata associated: Source, Organization, Company, Place, Event
• Utilities
  • Skin
  • Template
  • Usage Rule
  • Security
  • Team
  • Project
  • Product
  • Search – consider integrating into Feed
• Prime-related
  • Show
  • Season
  • Episode

User

• General users
  • Writer
  • Editor
  • Photo
  • Video
  • Can define multiple user groups based on the roles and permissions.
• Administrative users
• Developer

Major Features

• Navigation through the structure
• Search
• Communication and status tracking
• Statistics and social integration
• Text Editor
• Responsive and representative UI
• Autosave
• Preview
• History and Revision
• Configuration and personalization
• Media and chart assets

A way to display the status of the content

Content that the user edited and saved, Content that the user is assigned, and Content that the user specified to track

USE CASE

• News Associate checks the status of the article to see that the article she wrote is published.
• Editor checks and manages the status of an article.
• Data Journalism and Special Reports Editors needs to know when their articles are copy-edited and published.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Unclear status of content: Currently, there is no single, sure way of checking the status of a content type. Users rely on number of different methods to find out the status – check Google Doc Assignment List, refresh the CNBC.com pages, ask in person, etc.
• Initiating disruptive communication: To ensure the written article isn’t lost, sometimes the writers have to initiate the communication with the editors, which may disrupt the editor’s workflow. As the writers understand this, they choose this as the last resort when checking all the other sources fail.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• News Associate learns that the article she wrote is published without disrupting the Editor’s work.
• Editor easily checks and manages the status of an article.
• Data Journalism and Special Reports Editors can keep track of the status of the article and see when their articles are copy-edited and published.

BENEFITS

• Easily track the status of the content for the user
• To have a single, authentic go-to source of status information

FOCUS GROUP RANKING

• Quickly knowing the status of a specific story: 4.1 out of 5

A way to assign the content to a different user

USE CASE

• Editor assigns the News Article template to the News Associate to write.
• Special Reports Editor hands off the finished article to a Copy Editor.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Duplication of information and miscommunication: Information that is readily available in the CMS – Toolbelt ID, Slug, etc. – gets copied and pasted into Email, Slack, or Assignment List while handing off the content to a different team. During the process, users can make mistakes in copy and pasting the correct information, which will result in a follow-up communication.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• Editor can assign the News Article template with few clicks to the News Associate.
• Special Reports Editor can hand off the finished article to a Copy Editor with few clicks using a single system.

BENEFITS

• Faster and accurate communication and hand-off

FOCUS GROUP RANKING

• Efficiently handing off stories/assets to the next team: 4 out of 5
• Easily prioritize the list of things to do: 3.6 out of 5

Display of the latest activities and integrated performance & statistics in CMS

USE CASE

• Social team generates a report on which article received most views, clicks, and interactions of the week.
• Social team retweets the articles that were popular yesterday.
• Hot Seat ranks the article on the Homepage based on the relevance and importance of the article.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Multiple sources of statistics: Social Director gathers statistics data from multiple sources to illustrate which article and posts performed well that week. She needs to create the report every week and send it out via email.
• Low visibility of performances: The statistics on each article is available through Omniture, but they aren’t actively used to make decisions on which topics to cover next or which articles to rank on the Homepages. Only those who are interested will access the reports, which lives outside of the CMS.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• CMS users have easy access to the statistics reports readily available in the CMS, e.g. in the Dashboard.
• News Associate can easily see the number of views, comments, shares, and other metrics of success of the article that she wrote.
• Hot Seat sees the stats in the CMS, and can decide that the lowest-performing article on the Homepage can be removed and replaced with the newest article.

BENEFITS

• Offer the most popular and relevant content to readers
• Higher traffic
• Sense of ownership of the articles and its success

FOCUS GROUP RANKING

• View the performance of a particular story: 4.4 out of 5
• Easily see what the latest published stories are: 3.8 out of 5
• Ability to predict which story/topic would go viral: 3.6 out of 5

Integrated social workflow

Social Media workflow should be closely integrated within the CMS so that users can actively use the social assets in their articles as well as increase the social exposure of the articles.

USE CASE

• Editor embeds a tweet between the paragraphs.
• Social Media Associate Producer creates a graphic quote specifically for Instagram and uploads it on the CNBC official Instagram account.
• Social Media Associate Producer finds the latest article published on CNBC.com and posts the article on CNBC official Twitter and Facebook accounts.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Difficult to embed social media: One of the questions that are often asked to Social team is how to embed tweets within the article. Users would need to create a separate Webservice content type that holds the social post, and then drop this Webservice content into the Embedded Asset section of the article. This creates barriers for the novice user to write effective articles.
• Manually managing multiple platforms: While Twitter is mostly automated with the latest article published, many of the other higher-profile social platforms are separately managed by the Social team. They have to keep an eye on all the platforms, but there is no easy workflow to monitor and manage multiple feeds.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• Editor embeds a tweet between the paragraphs without leaving the News Story workflow.
• Social Media Associate Producer creates a graphic quote and uploads it to both Instragram and LinkedIn accounts with a single action from the CMS. The graphic quote would be uploaded in the Media Library of the CMS, which becomes readily available to all CMS users.
• Social Media Associate Producer is able to get a list of articles that meet specific criteria for social sharing, in one convenient place. After confirming the list and the destination, she can easily share out a number of articles to multiple platforms with only few clicks.

BENEFITS

• Easier embed of social media assets
• Reusable social media assets, e.g. infographics, graphic quotes
• Increase reader engagement with the article, as well as in social platforms
• Encourage sharing on social
• Faster social publishing

FOCUS GROUP RANKING

• Easily embed social media into a story: 3.9 out of 5
• Easily share the stories to social media: 3.5 out of 5

Simultaneous editing

USE CASE

• After the first video ingestion, if there is an error in the metadata, Video Editor needs to re-edit the metadata information while the video producer is editing the video asset.
• Photo Editor inserts a photo in a Breaking News article while the Breaking News Reporter is writing the article.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Fear of overriding: Currently, users can kick other users out of the editing, but they don’t use that functionality unless under a breaking news situation. By kicking others out, the user is risking the others losing their work and overriding their unsaved changes. Thus, they verbally confirm that the other user is finished editing before kicking someone out.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• Video Editor can edit the metadata while the Video Producer edits another metadata field of the content type at the same time.
• Photo Editor can insert a photo in the Embedded Asset section while the Breaking News reporter writes the article in the body at the same time.

BENEFITS

• Faster publishing
• Smoother workflow and communication
• No loss of work

Redesign Breaking News workflow

Instead of repurposing the News Story’s workflow, Breaking News requires a new workflow that’s more tailored for its need to be fast and accurate.

USE CASE

• Breaking News Editor creates the Breaking News content type and publishes with the initial headline.
• Breaking News Reporter writes the content in the Breaking News for second release.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Needs to prepare drafts/shells: Breaking news reporter or the Hot seat needs to prepare a draft/shell of the Breaking News story that is pre-created and already in the Output List. If they run out of the shells, they would need to create a new shell and insert it in the queue, which would slow down the process.
• Complicated Bullhorn rules: On first publishing, Hot Seat editor needs to not only publish the news itself but remember to turn on the 2 bullhorns that will each show the red banner and send the push notification on apps. She also needs to remember to deselect the bullhorn for the push notification after the initial release, or the system will send the mobile and email notification again when the Breaking News Franchise gets published. These bullhorns are not labeled, and Hot Seat Editor needs to remember which bullhorn is which. These extra steps may result in mistakes in pushing the news out to the audience or delay publishing process.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• Hot Seat Editor uses content type uniquely designed for Breaking News, which would contain all the necessary information for faster workflow.
• Hot Seat Editor can easily select when to display the red banner and send the push notifications, using the UI that clearly indicates its function that is specifically designed for Breaking News.

BENEFITS

• Deliver Breaking News faster to the readers
• Attract more readers

Redesign Slideshow workflow

Image uploading and setting the Slideshow should be performed within a single workflow & UI and augmented with functionalities that would speed up the creation of a Slideshow, e.g. bulk upload, slideshow-contextual captions, etc.

USE CASE

• Prime Producer creates a Slideshow to use it as a Episode Recap.
• Special Reports Editor creates a Slideshow to create visual ranking of a report.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Multiple layers: Users have expressed frustration towards having to use two different interfaces for uploading Images and creating a Slideshow. To publish a single Slideshow, the users need to upload and publish each image through Image content type, then create a Slideshow content type in the separate page. They then would need to search for the images that they just uploaded and drag each of the images in as Embedded Assets, one by one.
• Caption for slide images: Currently, captions of the images aren’t displayed anywhere in the Slideshow. Some users would like to use contextual captions that fit the story of the Slideshow.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• Prime Producer creates an Episode Recap Slideshow and bulk-uploads the images to be used in the Slideshow in the same UI.
• Special Reports Editor creates a Slideshow that ranks top 10 cities to start a business in. He inserts captions to each photo, describing the business featured in the photo.

BENEFITS

• Much faster publishing of Slideshows
• Reduces the mistake in publishing images and Slideshows
• Empowers more unique storytelling

Redesign Prime’s Show workflow

Instead of repurposing the News Story’s workflow featuring Wild Cards, WebResources, and single Output List, Prime’s Show and related pages require new workflows that are more tailored for entertainment needs.

USE CASE

• Prime Producer creates a hero carousel item to promote the week’s episodes.
• Prime Producer schedules a hero carousel item to be published on Saturday.
• Prime Producer updates the individual show page to reflect the latest contents.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Multiple Layers: To create a hero promo item and insert it in the carousel, Prime Producer needs to create a WebResource for the item itself, Wild Card to just have the title and description, and associate the WebResource in a specific Franchise. She needs to publish several layers of items from bottom up to simply update an item in the carousel.
• Reusing the News Story UI: When creating a hero carousel item, Prime Producer uses WebResource and Wild Card, which are meant to store the external website as an asset and hold any custom code, respectively. Curating the individual show page also relies on the default/featured/secondary settings of the news workflow’s single Output List, which doesn’t visually correspond to the Prime show page’s setup, where there are multiple shelves.
• Complicated and unreliable scheduling: There are two different locations that the hero carousel can be scheduled – at the WebResource level and at the Output List level. Scheduling actions at both places seems to break the system, and sometimes it does not publish the hero carousel at the scheduled time.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• Prime Producer creates a hero carousel item in a UI specially designed for show page content type. She associates images, text, and links in a single-page UI.
• Prime Producer schedules a hero carousel item to be published at a single location. The item goes live at the exact day and time that she has scheduled.
• Prime Producer updates the individual show page with the UI specially designed for show pages. She can curate the assets in the collections/lists that has a corresponding shelf on the front-end page.

BENEFITS

• Provides semantic structure to Prime pages
• Cleaner database
• Faster updates and publishing of Prime pages
• Easier onboarding of new producers

Rethinking of Editorial Search Content Type & Feed workflow

Instead of saving Editorial Search as a separate content type, UI for setting dynamic search criteria should be integrated within the Franchise’s Feed so that the user can easily set up the dynamic feeds within the workflow.

USE CASE

• Site Producer creates a dynamic feed in a Franchise to update it automatically with articles that satisfy certain criteria.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• No separate Search UI: The global bottom bar of the current CMS is typically used to set the filters and search criteria when the user is trying to search for a content. Site Producer uses the same UI to create the criteria of Editorial Search content. A novice user might not realize that the search UI is also used to configure the details on Editorial Search content type.
• Multiple steps: Since Editorial Search is a separate content type, once the Site Producer is in the Feed, he needs to use the search feature and search for it again in the system in order to assign it to a Franchise’s Feed.
• Can’t specify the display option per item: Currently, every story that comes from the same Editorial Search content type can only have one display setting. In order to apply different rules, the Site Producer needs to set up a separate instance of Editorial Search.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• Site Producer sets up the criteria in the Feed section of a Franchise using a specifically designed UI. He can configure the display size of the entire set of articles or assign specific sizes to the individual ones.

BENEFITS

• No extra structure and content type
• Easier to use to novice users
• Encourages the use of dynamic feeds and reduces the manual editorial effort

Internal or external notification when the status of the content is changed, or when the content gets assigned to you

USE CASE

• News Associate gets notified when the Editor assigns her an article to write.
• Copy Editor gets notified when the articles are ready to edit.
• Data Journalism Editor gets notified when the Video Editor attaches a video to the article he wrote.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Lack of communication: While the communication among the teams involved in a typical Editorial workflow – Editors, News Associates, Copy Editors, and Hot Seat – is comparatively well-established, the special teams that lie outside of the editorial workflow often doesn’t get notified with the status change of an article.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• News Associate gets instantly notified when the Editor assigns her an article to write. She can immediately start brainstorming on the article.
• Copy Editor gets instantly notified when the articles are ready to edit. He can schedule his day based on the length and urgency of the article.
• Data Journalism Editor gets notified when the Video Editor attaches a video to the article he wrote. He can immediately go in the article and check if the video goes well with his article.

BENEFITS

• Immediately get notified with the changes
• Prevents the duplication and mistakes in relaying the information about the content in CMS
• Eliminates a need of checking and communicating through multiple communication channels to receive work item
• Easy system to notify the person next in line

FOCUS GROUP RANKING

• Receiving notification when the status of a story changes: 3.7 out of 5
• Quickly getting the list of things to do: 3.4 out of 5

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

• Notifications on slack when video is ready for “Edit” and “Publishing”

Single-box inline text editor with componentized elements

USE CASE

• News Associate inserts and swaps the assets’ placement.
• Data Journalism Editor occasionally inserts a pull quote in his article.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Difficult to insert assets: It is extremely complicated to insert assets in between paragraphs of the near-completed article, as it requires separating out new body groups.
• Difficult to swap assets: Also, swapping the assets between body group is also difficult, as it doesn’t allow simple drag and drop. The user needs to search for one of the assets, remove the other asset after saving the ID, drag in the searched asset, and search for the removed asset again.
• Complicated and excessive UI: Structure of body groups and options for each of the group is complicated. There are options like Pull Quotes that aren’t used often but takes up a lot of screen space.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• News Associate simply drags and drops the assets around and places them in the desired spot in the article.
• When he reaches the part of the article that needs a pull quote, Data Journalism Editor exposes the option and inserts the pull quote.

BENEFITS

• Provides a low-fidelity representation of the final product
• Full drag-and-drop functionality of assets and components within the body of the text
• Easy inserting and rearranging of assets
• Minimal User Interface with smart, contextual options

FOCUS GROUP RANKING

• Easily replacing the assets in the text editor: 4.2 out of 5
• Easily embedding assets in the text editor of News Story content type: 4.1 out of 5
• Easily rearranging the embedded assets in the text editor of News Story: 3.9 out of 5

Rich Text Editor that functions as a word processor

The text editor should function as a full word processor and allow the convenient editing experience for the users who directly write their articles in the CMS. It should also accept pasted text from other word processing products, preserving the formatting and hyperlinks while removing any extra spacing.

USE CASE

• News Associate writes the article in Microsoft Word and pastes it into the text editor.
• News Associate pastes in the article copied from the partner sources.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Need to remove unintended formatting: Many users write their articles on a separate word processor, which allows them to access their work from any network or device from anywhere. These programs also have auto-saving feature, which makes separate word processor a preferred choice of these users. Thus, they often have to copy the entire article from these documents and paste it into CMS. Also, News Associates need to copy and paste the articles published in partner sites to create partner stories. However, when they paste in the articles into the CMS, they need to remove extra spacings after the paragraphs as well as any extra characters that are randomly generated. Or, they need to paste the article in the plain text editor before they paste it into the CMS to avoid the unintended spacings and characters.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• News Associate pastes in the article that she wrote in Microsoft Word. It preserves all the italicized text and hyperlinks to the external webpages and exact paragraph spacings.
• News Associate pastes in the article that she copies from USA Today. The formatting and hyperlinks of the article is preserved with exact paragraph spacings.

BENEFITS

• Reduces time to reformat the story in CMS
• Invites more users to use CMS as a word processing tool

Smart recommendation of assets, keywords, and headlines

Based on the article’s title and body text, the text editor should recommend what the most appropriate assets and headlines are as well as the keywords that are best optimized for search engines.

USE CASE

• Copy Editor edits headlines of different lengths that well summarizes the article and would intrigue the readers to click into the article.
• Hot Seat Editor highlights the appropriate words for Franchise, Person and Place in the Breaking News and hyperlinks them with the assets in the CMS.
• Video Producer inserts SEO keywords on the Video assets that would help the video to be ranked higher in the search engines.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Difficult to write effective headlines: Copy Editors News Associates who bring in the Partner Stories find it difficult to write or edit the headlines to be effective and captures the essence of the story. As these articles are not written by these users, it takes a while for them to read the story, understand the key message, and write the headlines that fit the character limit to draw the readers in.
• Difficult to create effective keywords: Some users finds it difficult to come up with the effective SEO keywords, as the content is either not written by them or video contents that require the user to watch and understand the clip.Video Producer: Even though the users know what keywords are related to the content, it might not be the most optimized for the search engines.
• Manual insertion of assets: While automatically ingested Partner Stories already have various words that are related to stock, place, and person assets hyperlinked and formatted, the original News Story or Breaking News doesn’t have this feature and makes the user to highlight and search for the assets one by one. This is often time-consuming and breaks the flow of writing.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• Copy Editor makes sure the automatically generated headlines fit the character limit and grammatically correct, without worrying if the headlines actually well-summarizes the content.
• Hot Seat Editor reads through the article and simply checks all the automatically highlighted Franchise, Person and Place words.
• VIdeo Producer simply checks that the automatically generated SEO keywords are in place.

BENEFITS

• Reduces the time of publishing
• Lightens the burden to read the article and fully understand it
• Improves SEO and increases user clicks

Improve the algorithm of the search result ranking

• Based on popularity, relevance, etc.
• Consider: personalized search result

USE CASE

• News Associate searches with the keyword “investing” to find the Investing Franchise to insert in the Primary Asset Section.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Unorganized search result: There is no apparent way to tell how the search results are ranked or listed. Searching over the term that frequently appears in news (e.g. Trump) results in multiple pages of news articles and related assets. Users often have to go through several pages before they find the asset they are looking for.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• News Associate searches with the keyword “investing” and finds the Investing Franchise at the top of the result page, as Franchises are most frequently searched content type.

BENEFITS

• Reduces time of finding an asset

FOCUS GROUP RANKING

• More organized search results: 4.6 out of 5
• Easily apply search filters: 4.1 out of 5

Flexible, Google-like keyword search

Search results would show all the content that includes the keywords regardless of order, and part of the keyword can be content type. (e.g. keywords “investing franchise” would give the Franchise titled ‘Investing’ as the top search result)

USE CASE

• News Associate wants to find a Franchise to insert in the Primary Asset section.
• Editor wants to embed a media file that is related to the article and needs to find the asset.
• Prime Producer wants to find an old content to reference while she is migrating the rest of the contents from the old WordPress.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Search allows only the exact phrase: Global search shows the users only the results that include the exact phrase in the slug. As the users might not remember the exact phrase/ slug of the content both old and new, they struggle to find the item that they are looking for.
• Difficult to use filters: Filter pop-up is difficult to use, as it doesn’t constantly stay up while the user is selecting the filters.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• News Associate searches for “investing” and gets the Franchise titled Investing at the top of the result, as it is the most popularly used content among the results of the search.
• Editor looking for a photo related to Brexit searches for “Brexit”. On the first page of the search result, she gets the video clips and articles that are often referenced by other users, but not the photos. She understands that Photo content type would not be one of the most popular or relevant content to other users, and adds “Photo” to the search term. By searching with “Brexit Photo”, she gets the photos that has Brexit as part of their slugs on the first page.
• Prime Producer searches for “American Greed S1 Gallery” to find all the galleries of Season 1. The result shows all the contents that include those words in the slug, including all the old content dating back to 2007 (start of season 1). Gallery content types would be ranked higher than other content types, showing those at the top of the result.

BENEFITS

• Higher chance of finding what the user is looking for
• Easily find old contents
• Easily filter by the content types

FOCUS GROUP RANKING

• Google-like search for stories/assets: 4.8 out of 5

More visual search result

• Clearly display the content type
• Thumbnails of media items displayed up front

USE CASE

• Photo Desk Editor finds a photo that is related to a specific topic.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Text-centric Search Result: When the users are looking for a specific photo or video, they need to open the information drawer to see the thumbnail of the media assets. It makes it difficult to browse through the system and find the appropriate media item to insert in the article.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• Photo Desk wants to find a photo related to 2016 Election in the CMS to include it in an article. He searches with the keyword “2016 Election” and browses the photos in the system at a first glance. He easily chooses a photo that is the most appropriate and has not been used several times already.

BENEFITS

• Reduces the amount of time to find a Media type
• Aesthetically pleasing search result

FOCUS GROUP RANKING

• More visual search results of media items: 3.6 out of 5

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

• Image cards: Large thumbnails in image search results

Further Enhancements

• Fast loading search results
  FOCUS GROUP RANKING – Fast loading search results: 4.3 out of 5
• Predictive search, which auto-completes the keyword based on algorithm
• “Did you mean” feature, which catches user’s typos and suggests better keywords
• Contextual suggestion of keywords, which presents the user with the suggested keywords based on where the user is in the workflow

Single-page interface per content type

All the fields that are relevant to the content type should live in a single-page. Fields will be organized based on their functionality, similarity, and their use cases in the user’s workflow. In the more advanced setup, each individual user can configure or temporarily rearrange the order of the fields to set them in the order and placement that make the most sense to his or her own workflow.

USE CASE

• News Associate copies the text from the body and paste it into SEO Keyword field.
• News Associate needs to always fill out Unpublish Date and Canonical URL Override fields for Partner Stories.
• Make It Editor checks all the important fields are filled out properly.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Constant flipping between the tabs: When filling out the Keyword field, the users need to refer to the body text to avoid typos and to include important keywords from the article. They need to constantly flip between the Content tab, which has the body text of the article, and the Promotional tab, which has the Keyword field.
• Forgetting to fill in important fields: As fields are dispersed across different tabs, the users sometimes forget to check all the tabs and make sure the important fields are filled out.
• Inconvenient placement of fields: Even though some of the fields are considered similar in functionality and often filled out together in the context, they are placed in different tabs or far apart on the page, makes it difficult for the users to remember to fill them or chasing after the same information twice.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• News Associate can move the Keyword field right next to the body text editor and easily copies and pastes in the important words in the Keyword field.
• News Associate sees Unpublish Date and URL Override field right next to each other for Partner Stories. She can immediately copy and paste the original URL of the article right after she sets the unpublish date of the Partner Story without losing her train of thought.
• Make It Editor has all the key fields of a Make It story in a single view, which she goes down the page and check off that all the content is there and correctly set.

BENEFITS

• Check all fields at a glance
• Easily refer to and compare different fields
• Fields set to the order and group that makes the most sense to the user and the workflow

Responsive User Interface

USE CASE

• Copy Editor zooms in the browser to read in larger text format before start editing.
• Data Journalism Editor uses vertical monitors at his desk to make the graphic editing easier.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Non-responsive UI and options becoming hidden: Users have different settings of their monitor and system depending on their needs. Older users zoom in the browser to read with larger fonts, while other users use vertical monitors or multiple monitors. Due to the inflexible UI, different set-ups often result in narrow text editor, invisible search filter box, hidden embed options, etc.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• Copy Editor zooms in the browser and still gets all the embed options per paragraph.
• Data Journalism Editor can use the full filter search while using the vertical monitor.

BENEFITS

• Convenient editing and publishing
• Opens the possibility of editing from mobile devices

FOCUS GROUP RANKING

• Ability to edit CMS from mobile: 4.2 out of 5

Redesign the pop-up

USE CASE

• News Associate highlights a word and hyperlinks the word to the related link.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Inconvenient placement: Pop-up to highlight a word originates from where the highlighted word is, which sometimes makes the pop-up to appear out of the viewport when the highlighted word is towards the bottom.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• News Associate highlights a word to hyperlink. The related option appears right where she expects, and she can easily fill out the information and assign a hyperlink.

BENEFITS

• Faster hyperlinking and publishing

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

• inline link UI improvements to make it easier to bring up the link form and enter links

Accurate UI representation of drag & drop

USE CASE

• Data Journalism Editor grabs a Franchise and drops it into the Primary Asset bucket.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Difficult to drag & drop: it is sometimes difficult to grab an asset, or the grabbed asset during the dragging operation is slightly off the cursor, making it confusing when to let the mouse go.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• Data Journalism Editor grabs a Franchise asset. The silhouette of grabbed asset to appear directly under the cursor. When he starts moving the cursor into the vicinity of the Primary Asset bucket, the silhouette of the asset snaps to the bucket, making it clear that he can let the cursor go to assign the asset.

BENEFITS

• No mistakes in asset assignment
• Faster and smoother workflow

Output List to better represent the front-end result

USE CASE

• Hot Seat Editor configures the Output List of the U.S. Homepage Franchise to promote the newest news stories.
• International Design Director configures the Output List of the U.K. Homepage Franchise to promote the newest sponsor Franchise.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Paginated Output List and Saving: A page of the Output List in the CMS holds fewer items than the new homepage design can hold. Therefore, the user needs to go to a different page of the Output List to add or remove the items in the bottom of the homepage. However, any changes made in each page of the Output List is lost without saving or publishing the entire Franchise, making it difficult to update pages.
• Mismatch of placement: The articles don’t appear in the same order on the homepage as listed in the Output List. For example, it is important to promote 2 related articles in the 1st and 2nd lead on the homepage, but the placement of each in the Output List is 1st and 8th. This order is ignored on the mobile version of the homepage, where the 8th item in the Output List appears on the 8th place on the homepage. User who programs the Output List should not only remember these quirks but also take these different situations into consideration.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• Hot Seat Editor has all the articles that will be displayed on the homepage represented in a single page. If paginated, she can freely move among the pages without needing to save or losing her work.
• Hot Seat Editor can place the 2nd lead article at the 2nd spot on the Output List, consistently on both Desktop and Mobile sites.

BENEFITS

• Easier and faster homepage curation
• Easier and faster troubleshooting on homepage lists

Quick Edit of embedded assets

Embedded assets’ Metadata that often need modifying in a workflow should be editable within the workflow.

USE CASE

• Make It Editor finds the error and corrects the caption of the photo while proofreading and editing the Make It article.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Needs to open separate tabs: In order to edit the metadata of embedded assets, users need to open the assets in new tabs to edit them individually. It takes a while to open the asset, find the area to edit, and publish out the changes.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• Make It Editor finds the error in the caption of the embedded photo. She can quickly edit the caption without leaving the workflow of editing the story.

BENEFITS

• Faster editing and publishing of articles
• Convenient workflow

Clean visual representation of the Franchise tree structure

• Navigate through different Franchises and visually see the relationship
• See what Utility content types – Skin, Templates, etc. – are affecting the specific Franchise, and which Parent holds those content types

USE CASE

• Prime Producer is able to track the Parent Franchise that has a Skin, which is causing an styling issue on the hero carousel on the all shows page.
• News Associate associates a Skin to an article.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Difficult Configuration: Many users do not understand how the Franchises and articles are structured, and often requires help from the Site Producers and developers who have better understanding of the architecture and the system.
• Complicated Structure: When trying to troubleshoot the issue related to the Utility content types, it is often difficult to locate where those files are coming from in the structure. While tracing up the tree structure, users get lost where they are or forget what they are looking for.
• Slow Loading of Tree Structure: There is a UI to view the tree structure of the Franchise in place, but the loading of it is very slow.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• Prime Producer easily locates the Parent Franchise that has a Skin, which is causing an issue on the hero carousel on the all shows page. She easily learns that the Parent Franchise is two levels above, and she can directly go to the Franchise and resolve the issue.
• News Associate can easily associate a Skin to an article and understand the impact of it to the front-end design. System guides her through the process, and she doesn’t require any extra help.

BENEFITS

• General understanding of the site’s structure
• Easy troubleshooting with specific front-end design issues

FOCUS GROUP RANKING

• Easily navigate to different parts of the CMS: 4.5 out of 5

Clear guidelines on creating, requesting, and assigning Utilities content type

Utilities content type: e.g. Skins, Templates, Editorial Search, etc.

USE CASE

• Video Producer assigns an Organization content type in the video’s Primary Asset section.
• News Associate applies a Skin to give the article a special design.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Difficult configuration: Many users do not understand how the Franchises and articles are structured, and often requires help from the Site Producers and developers who have better understanding of the architecture and the system.
• Unknown protocol: Some users don’t know if they can create or request Utilities content type when the needed assets don’t exist. Currently, they simply don’t use the content type and not assign the necessary Utilities.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• Video Producer finds that there is no Organization content type that she needs. She creates an Organization content type herself.
• News Associate knows how to apply a Skin to her article and understand what would change in the front-end design.

BENEFITS

• Higher exposure of videos and articles to the end-users
• Faster publication of articles and videos

Ability to configure fields per content type or user permission

Each content type can be configured to have different fields, only showing the fields that are relevant to the workflow and use cases. It also allows to add additional fields when there is a need of adding more metadata to the content type.

USE CASE

• Data Journalism Editor creates a Chart to embed in the story.
• Site Producer creates a Skin to apply a unique style to a special Franchise.
• News Associate creates a News Story asset.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Useless fields: There are many fields in various content types that are not used at all in the workflow. They simply take up space and makes it difficult to locate the fields that are actually needed. Certain fields under Configuration isn’t touched at all by the regular writers, making the interface confusing and complicated.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• Data Journalism Editor creates a Chart and finds a place to upload the image of the chart immediately.
• Site Producer creates a Skin and finds a place to upload the code files immediately.
• News Associate only sees and fills the fields that are necessary for writing a story.

BENEFITS

• Reduces the time of publishing
• Clear which field needs to be filled in and reduces the mistakes
• Simpler UI and potentially faster performance
• Flexible and future-proof content management

FOCUS GROUP RANKING

• Not seeing the fields that are irrelevant to the content type: 3 out of 5

Ability to configure default values and required fields per content type

Each content type can be configured to have different required fields, validation messages, and default values based on the use cases.

USE CASE

• News Associate sets the Partner Story’s Unpublish Date to 3 months ahead.
• Make It Editor makes sure that there is a photo bullhorned in the Primary Assets section.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Critical opt-in from memory: Depending on which content type they are working on, many users need to remember to fill out or opt into certain fields. Without filling those critical fields, the content doesn’t get displayed correctly on the front-end website or result in less apparent consequences that may be difficult to catch. Some of the many examples include: bullhorning the photos, setting the unpublish date on Partner Stories, use the same caption and description for photos, etc.
• No validation or warning: Even though certain fields are critical to fill in for the content type, there is no validation message that warns the user that it is important and required to fill out the fields. This makes the users to often make mistakes and forget to enter important information or perform certain actions.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• News Associate creates a Partner Story and designates that the story is coming from USA Today. The system knows that the stories from USA Today should expire after 3 months, so it automatically sets the Unpublish Date field to the date 3 months from now.
• Make It Editor forgets to check if an image is bullhorned and tries to publish. The system warns her that there is no image that is bullhorned, and the editor realizes that there is in fact no bullhorned image. She bullhorns the most important image in the article and publishes again. The published image has promotional image now that will be shown all over the social media.

BENEFITS

• Easy to use for the novice users
• Reduces the amount of things to remember and be careful of
• Reduces the mistakes in the final product

Ability to configure the character limits of each field

Applicable fields: Link Headline, Shorter Headline, Shortest Headline, Description, Shorter Description, Shortest Description

USE CASE

• News Associate writes the headlines and descriptions to fit the character limits set by the editorial leadership.
• Copy Editor edits the headlines and descriptions to fit the character limits set by the editorial leadership.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Needs to know the character limits from memory: The character display and color-coded warning at each field are out of date, and the users need to recall them from memory. The character limit changes depending on the editorial leadership and their guideline, and the CMS doesn’t reflect those changes. Users need to stay tuned to the new guideline that comes through email and need to constantly refer to it or recall from memory.
• Constantly fixing the same issues: As the system doesn’t offer accurate character limit, Copy Editor finds the issue with the character limits on many of the articles that he copy-edits.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• News Associate writes the headlines and descriptions while relying on the character limits set by a senior editor in the system.
• Copy Editor only checks the grammar and spelling mistakes on the headlines and descriptions, not worrying about editing the copy to fit the character limits.

BENEFITS

• Easy change and distribution of new guideline
• Reduces the time of editing

Ability to configure helper text

Helper text per content type and/or per field should be configurable, offering the users the context, usage on the front-end, and guidelines on how and what to fill in the fields.

USE CASE

• News Associate writes the headlines.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Constantly fixing or addressing the same issues: More advanced users or those who have job functions related to a specific field are asked the same type of questions from the other regular users on what a specific field is for and how that information is going to be used in the front-end site. For example, the Social Media team often gets asked which headline field will be used for sharing on Twitter. Also, Copy Editors often have to fix the same mistakes made by the writers, e.g. fixing text to present tense.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• News Associate writes the Shorter Headline after reading the helper text available. She understands that this headline will be used as the title when shared on Twitter, and that she has to write the text in present tense to make it sound more relevant to the readers.

BENEFITS

• Reduces unnecessary communication
• Reduces mistakes
• Reduces the time of editing
• Effective content and better reader engagement

Autosave of content

CMS can offer draft auto-saving feature on all content types. While the user is making changes in the content type, the changes are saved as “work-in-progress” draft, which does not affect the canonical version or other users’ work. In the event of system errors, user should be able to easily retrieve the draft.

USE CASE

• News Associate saves the News Story after she finishes writing each paragraph.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Frequent and time-consuming saving action: Users fear losing their work while they make changes or write directly into CMS, and save the content as often as after every single paragraph. Saving process takes few seconds and takes the user away from the workflow.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• News Associate writes the News Story without worrying about losing her work. In the event of system crashing, she can go through the list of autosaved versions and retrieve the version that has the latest content.

BENEFITS

• Smooth editorial workflow
• Faster writing, editing, and publishing

FOCUS GROUP RANKING

• Story autosaving: 4.1 out of 5

System message displaying the saving progress

While saving and publishing, CMS should display a system message and progress bar to let the user know the status of the saving and the expected time of waiting.

USE CASE

• Photo Editor publishes the photo he found for an article.
• Video Editor saves the video that she finished editing.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Slow loading and saving: Loading and the saving of the image and video assets are slow, which adds to the time and the complexity of the process. Without the status message, users have to simply wait until something changes in the loading screen and wouldn’t be able to tell if something has gone wrong during the saving or if the system is simply being slow.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• Photo Editor publishes the photo, and he sees that there is an error in the server while uploading the photo. He gets a contact information from the system message to report the issue.
• Video Editor saves the video, and she learns that it would take about 2 minutes to finish saving the video. She can start editing another video file while she waits for it to finish saving.

BENEFITS

• Shorten the perceived wait time
• Better sense and control of user’s own workflow

Confirmation message on Publish for high-stake content types

Any news articles and Franchises, but not assets like images or videos

USE CASE

• Copy Editor edits the article and publishes when the copy-editing is finished.
• Data Journalism Editor publishes multiple images and charts and embed them in the article.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Publish high-stake content types by mistake: Some users had experiences of accidentally publishing the articles that are not ready for final publication, as the Save and Publish options sit closely together and there is no warning of confirmation message to prevent the user from double-checking their actions.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• Copy Editor tries to save the article after editing half of the article, but accidentally clicks Publish button. The system gives the confirmation message asking if he is sure that he wants to publish. He cancels the dialog and correctly clicks on Save button.
• Data Journalism Editor publishes multiple images without getting any system messages. When he embeds the images in the article and publishes it, he gets a message confirming the publishing action. He clicks Publish once again to publish the article on the site.

BENEFITS

• Prevent publish mistakes
• Allows fast publishing of assets but gatekeeping the publishing of articles

Complete, true-to-life preview

CMS should offer full preview the articles and pages that closely matches the final product.

USE CASE

• Special Reports Editor previews the Slideshow that he created for visual ranking.
• Data Journalism Editor previews the article he edited before he hands the article off to the Copy Editor.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Certain elements not displaying and skewing the placements: Elements such as Deck (Short Description of article), embedded tweets and videos, and ad units don’t get displayed in the preview, which skews the placements of the rest of the article. Ad placement is especially important in Slideshows, where it pushes down the text in the site. Without the ad displaying, it is difficult for the editors to see where the text of the slide will fall below the fold.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• Special Reports Editor previews the Slideshow with the ad placed inside, and he can accurately control the length of the slide to fit the screen.
• Data Journalism Editor previews the article and makes sure that Deck is displayed correctly without any typos and embedded assets are linked correctly.

BENEFITS

• Faster and more accurate publishing
• Visually balanced articles and pages

Centralized media sources

CMS should be a centralized source of various media items, including 3rd party wire photos, and CNBC proprietary images. Videos should also come from the same location with the acceptable file formats so that the editors can always find them at the same place.

USE CASE

• Photo Editor licenses the wire service’s image to use in the article.
• Photo Editor finds the CNBC proprietary image to use in the article.
• Video Editor finds the Prime video to ingest.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Needs to visit multiple sources: As there are a number of photo subscription services that CNBC is using, Photo Editor needs to visit all of them to find a suitable image, or selectively visits the sites from memory that thinks will have the photo. In case of video files, most of the .com-related files can be found in the folder directly connected in Edius, while Prime-related files are usually through Dropbox or other external links. Video Editors need to remember the access route and folders in the Dropbox to find the appropriate video file and drop it into Edius.
• Broken file formats: As the video files are coming from multiple sources, there’s no way to assure quality, thus, some of the video formats are broken or not accepted by Edius, which causes the program to crash. If the error happens, the Video Editor needs to contact the requester to get the right file.
• CNBC proprietary images are not used: There are more than 100,000 photos that CNBC’s production team took and stored in a separate server without an image management system. Since Photo Desk team is the only team that has the knowledge to access these photos, not many users know the existence of these photos and not often used in articles.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• Photo Editor browses through a single feed of wire and proprietary photos combined. He can search and filter by keywords and criteria, and he can license the wire photos directly through CMS.
• Video Editor finds all the videos she needs to ingest in a directory connected from Edius system.

BENEFITS

• Faster video ingestion and photo placement
• Richer visual experience for readers with effective photo assets

High-resolution images in CMS

USE CASE

• Photo Editor uploads licensed images into the CMS.
• Social Associate Producer searches for the high-resolution images in the CMS to use in the photo card in Instagram.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• CMS does not accept large images: For the images that are too large, Toolbelt generates a message that says “File too big”. Photo Editor needs to downsize the image so that the width of the image is 2000px. It would be better for Toolbelt to hold the original image, not only to eliminate a step in Photo Editor’s workflow but also to offer high-resolution images for those who look for the images on their own in Toolbelt.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• Photo Editor uploads the image directly downloaded from the image sources.
• Social Associate Producer searches for the images in the CMS. She can download the image in its highest quality to use in the photo card in Instagram.

BENEFITS

• High image quality in articles and social media
• Reduces an unnecessary step in image editing

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

• Hiding low-resolution video thumbnails from search

Integrated charting capability and improvements

CMS should integrate 3rd party charting service or provide internal charting capability that would be seamlessly incorporated into the workflow of Editors and Producers.

USE CASE

• Data Journalism Editor creates an interactive chart that visually shows the data and embeds it in the article.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Using 3rd party application for richer experience: Currently, most of the users use 3rd party application (e.g. Chartbeat) to generate interactive charts. The Chart feature currently in Toolbelt only supports .csv files and simple charts, which doesn’t meet the users’ needs.
• Needs better curated workflow: Current Chart asset holds the chart information or the image, but doesn’t go much beyond that. As the fields are not specific to the Chart, there is no place to enter source or caption to the chart, which needs to be displayed within the article. Users work around this issue by entering the information in the body of the story.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• Data Journalism Editor creates an interactive chart within the CMS that uses the color theme that goes well with the website. He can enter all the metadata related to the charts, and they will appear in appropriate places on the front-end website

BENEFITS

• Unified style and metadata of charts across the site with customization capabilities
• Complete control over multi-platform publishing
• Integrated within the workflow

Improve photo editing tools

CMS should offer basic photo editing capabilities that result in accurate and high-resolution derivation of the original image. Some of the useful edits include: crop, basic level adjustments, vignetting

USE CASE

• Photo Editor sets a focal point on the image to use it for smaller crop sizes.
• Photo Editor edits an image in Photoshop to vignette the image.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Image crops losing colors: The image crops that are automatically generated by the different image sizes loses vibrancy of the original photo.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• Photo Editor sets a focal point on the image to use it for smaller crop sizes. The smaller images retain the full color space of the original image.
• Photo Editor uploads the original image in the CMS and decides to use vignette style on the image. By selecting an option in the CMS, he can apply simple vignette effect on the image and generate a separate image for the News Associate to use in the article.

BENEFITS

• High-quality images
• Faster image publishing

FOCUS GROUP RANKING

• Ability to do basic edits on photos, e.g. crop, level, contrast: 3.7 out of 5

No video pre-roll on preview

When accessing the in-house video from the Preview mode or from internal network, pre-roll ad should be removed so that it allows for quick checking by the Copy Editor.

USE CASE

• Copy Editor checks that the in-house video is the correct video and that it plays.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Forced to watch ads: If the video is an in-house clip, there is a 30-second ad that the viewers cannot skip. Even when the Copy Editor is internally checking and reviewing the video, the ad will still play without the ability to skip. This takes away 30 seconds of his time while he waits for the ad to finish playing.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• Copy Editor can check the video’s content and functionality without seeing the advertisements.

BENEFITS

• Reduces time of editing and content-proofing

Free-form editor in Wild Card

USE CASE

• Site Producer creates a Wild Card to upload the CSS and JS code to use in a Skin template.
• Prime Producer creates a Wild Card to create one-off pages with interactive elements.

CURRENT PAIN-POINTS

• Can’t make direct changes to the code: Wild Card only accepts code in a separately uploaded file, and the users can’t make quick changes to the code. They would need to delete the file, make the change locally in an editor, and upload the file again.

IDEAL SCENARIO

• Site Producer and Prime Producer can quickly make changes and correct mistakes in the code inside the CMS.

BENEFITS

• Faster changes and corrections on codes

Other Improvements

• Componentized UI elements that can be ranked, e.g. Favorites, Primary Assets
  • RECENT DEVELOPMENTS: Ability to rank items in the favorites tab
• Default value of the hyperlinks to be opening in the new tab
• Access of CMS from mobile devices and other networks
• Functioning Clone capability for videos
• Integrated spellchecker and style guide
• Slideshow with both images and videos