Net-New Content Migration Tool

The Washington Post’s Arc XP onboarding is time-consuming manual work for customer teams as new clients with large amounts of data. Understanding the pain points of the current process and designing a new tool to reduce this will save the business time and money.

Date: August 2022 - December 2023

My Role: Lead Product Designer

Overview

Problem to solve: How do we solve data mapping and validation issues within a user-friendly web interface?

The current developer toolset for migrating third-party content to the Arc XP CMS platform takes the user experience engineering team an hour per file. Each new client Arc XP is migrating will have between 30,000 and 100,000 files. Individual engineers have found ways to reduce this time manually, this knowledge is not documented and cannot be passed on to contractor teams with high turnover.

This project focused on finding the current journey of users and finding a way to provide a faster way for the onboarding teams to reformat content.

Design Process

Initial Research

Understanding what is needed. Aligning with goals with the technical product manager and engineering teams.
Work with the customer experience team to understand the pain points in how they currently migrate to Arc

Key Findings:

A visual element is needed to allow users to associate the original JSON files with the counterparts in the Arc XP system
Allow users to quickly find errors in the mapping to speed up the process

Current user flow:

Prioritization

Worked with product manager, engineering lead, and design intern to prioritize what projects should be a part of this project

Summary of potential features

Mapping tool functionalities

Creating
Editing
Locking
Cloning
Downloading
Auto-map
Validation

Tooltips and UI improvements

Tooltips and informational text
Auto-saving with UI notifications

**Initial Prioritization Exercise with team stakeholders**

**Prioritization broken down into MVP, Post-MVP and Future features**

User and Service Flow

After discovering the current flow used the team dove in and created a flow of what needed to be completed for the new flow to reduce the cognitive load for users.

Wireframing Use Cases

Solution 1 testing

User Testing

Users can understand how to create and complete the map to transform their original file to ANS format.
Users can refer to the original file section during the mapping.
Users can add additional fields not listed in the template.

Key findings

Need for continued simplification
Embed tooltips to reduce the need for external documentation.
Remove the need for users to have to fill in so many fields

Solution 2

The findings from the user interviews showed the first solution required too many fields for each association. The second solution reduced the cognitive load required to use the tool by reducing the amount of information the user had to fill out each time.

As seen in the prototype below the amount of fields a user needs to fill out within the template is reduced to associate each original field with its new counterpart.

Key Highlights:

Introduction of Tabs to allow users to find which fields they quickly need to map
Introduction of Tooltips to enable learning for users new to Arc XP Systems
Removing fields the were unnecessary for the mapping process

Solution 3 and final takeaways

Design System:

This product stayed in wireframe visuals to not distract stakeholders from the overall patterns the team was trying to create. In this final version, all patterns were transformed into the Arc Design System for the visual language. This allowed the team to focus solely on the patterns needed for this new initiative.

Key Design takeaways

My Key Contributions

Research and Discovery:

Worked with 3 internal technical teams to understand platform capabilities and where the migration process could be improved.
My research indicated a need for a visual tool to map JSON files. I worked with my team to introduce this new area of scope, resulting in a faster migration process

Prioritization and Design Decisions:

Collaborated with a cross-discipline team to ideate an initial launch and crafted a roadmap to ensure the remaining features were rolled out following release.

User Flow and Cognitive Load Reduction:

Redesigning the user flow to reduce cognitive load. Identified that the initial solution required users and simplified by reducing the number of fields

Design System Integration:

The final version of the tool was aligned with the Arc Design System, ensuring consistency with the visual language and overall patterns.

My Overall Impact

Reduced migration time by 68% through simplified user flows.
Improved training efficiency by 30%, making onboarding faster.
Designed a scalable tool that allowed easy integration of new features.
Innovated to provide new features that streamline a cumbersome migration process
Contributed to the fledgling design system, adding new, repeatable patterns.

Retrospective

The initial launch was smaller than we predicted. We did this to ensure we could rapidly deliver and iterate and our initial solutions enabled customer experience teams to shorten training by 30% and reduce migration time by 68%

Additional initiatives were built onto this project after launch and because of how the mapper was designed the team easily added the new functionality to it. The new functionality allows for the ingestion of data feeds. The use case added feeds from sources such as the Associated Press and Getty Images.