Forbes Internship: CMS UX Design
Platform: Desktop Web
Team: Product Designer
Product Owner
Software Engineers
Duration: 6 Weeks (Summer 2022)
Tools: Sketch, Figma, Adobe Illustrator, Miro
About: Developing Forbes CMS
Goal: To research and develop UX upgrades on Forbes' CMS (Bertie) for their Bertie assistant feature which serves as an assistant for authors/users and gives streamlined stats insights about their articles/newsletters. The goal of the project is to upgrade the UX of the Bertie assistant. Add or remove features making it more user-friendly and get access to all the features of the assistant while editing their newsletters and articles.
My Role: Lead the process of research and designing the Bertie assistant which would satisfy the current needs of the user and seek feedback from my Design Director, the Director of Data Products, and the Associate Product Owner to design the best outcome based on the research we did.
Background: The Assistant is meant to help writers create for Forbes.com more effectively and efficiently. Its skills are driven by machine learning.
The “Assistant” has the strongest presence in the Story Editor within the ‘drawer.’ Users can access it by clicking the Hat in the top navigation bar. Currently, it focuses on things like SEO and Forbes editorial standards. The most used tool is the Headline Strength category, which suggests keywords to use, suggests the optimum headline length, and corrects any editorial style issues.
Design Process
Initial Audit and Research
I audited the current Bertie assistant and came out with conclusions after summarizing some user interviews. The user interview aimed to find:
Do the users understand the Bertie assistant feature
Which feature would be most important for the user, and their prioratization
Educate the users on the current features
Favorite feature
The Insights gained from the user interviews are:
Some features of the assistant were not known to some users and they loved that there were some features that would be useful for them
They prioritized the headline SEO and Image recommendations more than the other features
The users would like to see the word count on the screen and not go inside the assistant tab to fetch the feature.
Design and Development
With the initial audit and feedback from my team, I was able to narrow down to a few design directions:
Missformated H2 suggestions under SEO suggestions
Developing story stats
Notification
Solutions
Created some solutions that would enhance the user experience, and improve the overall user usability of the assistant. Some of the solutions are listed below:
Notification Blobs for the assistant has been added for the users to check the new suggestions
Categorized the checklist and suggestions options in the assistant for ease of differentiation and navigation
Quick word count check for the author through toggle option. This would help for fast functions
Forbes Front End Design
I worked on some mini projects for the front end from creating icons and the design system alignment for some of Forbes's website
Forbes Digital Assets, Forbes News Letters, Design system alignment, and Bertie are some of the front-end projects that I worked on during my time at Forbes
Created the design system alignment for the SAP Brandvoice page in Forbes.com
Platform: Desktop Web and Mobile
Team: Product Designer
Software Engineers
Duration: 6 Weeks (Summer 2022)
Tools: Sketch, Figma, Adobe Illustrator, Miro
Created some icons for the Forbes digital assets web and mobile page
Extension of these projects are currently under deployment process and will be soon live on the site
