02/03
In today's international news landscape, we find a multitude of players constantly having to adapt to new usages. To be able to manage this versatility, their CMS must adapt to every need. In order to do that, France Media Monde created their own in-house CMS but had issues to keep up with the trends. It is in this context that we helped them redesign their CMS.
Benchmark, Workshops, Interviews, Audit, Prototype
Figma / Miro / Office Suite
4 months
1
Discovery
Discovering the product and creating a competitive benchmark based on the client’s problematics
2
Research
Understanding user needs and requirements through user interviews and UX Audit
3
Prioritization
Scoping and prioritizing the user stories through a PXL model
4
UI & Style Guides
Creating wireframes and prototypes to visualize the user interface
5
Recommendations
Helping to share the learnings and the ambitions of the project to the whole company
The France Media Monde (FMM) group is a national programming company that supervises and coordinates the activities of French state-owned public radio and television stations with international broadcasting. The FMM Group employs 1,600 people of 64 nationalities, most of whom use the in-house content management system "Bach".
As we never worked for a global size media, we had to understand the existing tools that they chose to not use and what they were doing. We also discovered their in-house CMS in order to answer our doubts, misunderstanding or hypothesis in a quick first approach in order to deep dive in the understanding of the true users’ needs.
We have identified a number of hypotheses to be explored:
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Focus on essential functions, give an impression of clarity and simplicity. Functional elements could be hidden.
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Need to identify key usage flows during interviews especially on the video content management
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A lack of pedagogy in the tool, which can be difficult to master. Integration of an onboarding phase could be interesting
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Need to identify the most common contribution errors, and gather ideas on which success indicators to highlight
In order to give us a vision of existing similar tools, we did a benchmark of CMS, CRM and editors specializing in article creation. We extended it to financial dashboards, single sign-on systems, tag managers and Dribbble tests.
Once this research was complete, we presented the interesting functionalities, elements and visuals to our client.
This table presents anonymized data and fictitious results for illustrative purposes
We chose to conduct interview for several reasons:
First, we created an interview guide based on the previous hypothesis conducted from the Product Discovery. We did it without leading the conversation to our suppositions, we tried to be as neutral as possible during the interview.
We wanted the interview to give a lot of space for free speech to discover things we didn’t know about. Questions were here to focus on every aspects of the tool for the user. We also prepared some questions focused on their global process to understand how the tool was integrated in their daily life and how it could help them more.
We conducted 6 user interviews with users giving a wide range of jobs, experience and redaction size. As France Media Monde is an international news company, a lot of local redactions exist and have different process depending on their culture and size.
Every interview last 1 hour and was done with 2 interviewers : one directed the interview and the other one was writing done every useful data, switching roles at every interview. We also recorded the interviews in order to find some specific verbatim.
Some parts are blurred out from the interview guide for non disclosure purposes
We did a presentation in order to give useful data we could gather. This presentation included creation and edition processes that were not clear enough for the product team, problems identified by their users (with verbatim) and how we could change the tools to answer these needs.
To summarize:
We created an UX audit based on our product discovery report which helped us to clarify certain grey areas and highlight certain issues. In addition, we refined our understanding of user paths and issues through interviews with FMM employees. We carried out a complete audit of “Bach”.
This audit was based on heuristics that combine ergonomics, strategy and web best practices (accessibility, environment, privacy). Moreover we also track statistics of usage in order to identify common path, problems or bugs.
For each screen or functionality, we highlighted the problems and the solutions that we suggested based on our previous learnings. These learnings are too specific to be shared here.
Product team regularly organize workshops that give them opportunity to raise technical points, but they’ll need to open up their research to a diversity of users and themes to structurally improve the experience. The 6 profile we could interview were versatile but not representative of the whole users existing on the app.
This screenshot is purposely unzoomed for non disclosure reasons
We organized 2 workshops of 2h each in order to scope the functionalities in a Backlog, the process flows and KPIs in different sprints. To do so we used a PXL model in order to prioritize objectively the user stories and the key screens we would have to design. The PXL model was adapted with categories useful for FMM and took into account their internal political issues between teams.
We focused on key screens:
In order to give a stronger differentiation while keeping the same technical basis, the UI accented specificities for each application with colors and focused on audio for RFI, video for France 24.
This screenshot is purposely unzoomed for non disclosure reasons
It's even more important than usual to explain and justify our choices, because FMM is an institutional company that comes from print before being present on the Web. With the aim of convincing their hierarchy of the merits of these changes, and federating the whole company in the pursuit of continuous improvement, we supported the product team in the creation of a complete presentation.
Through this investigation we were able to uncover more information from the users regarding their daily process and collaboration. We decided KPIs to follow and product team should conduct interviews with the same 6 people in order to have quantitative and qualitative data to measure the impact regarding the objectives. The product team needs to continue conducting workshops with different users and themes, monitoring analytics and continue improving the tool.
On a personal aspect, I’m more than happy to have the opportunity to discover media CMS with a complex structure. It was my first time working on an internal tool and was a great experience.
