Our team was relying heavily on stakeholder check-ins to satisfy user feedback needs in the design process. This led to constant shifts in requirements and opposing suggestions with no results to back up our design decisions. We needed a formal user research process so we could gather more objective usability feedback about our designs and present solutions with more confidence.

I started a bi-weekly user review meeting to help us balance stakeholder presentations with user feedback. Every other week, we discuss which projects are ready for testing or need extra discovery to help us recruit the best newsroom users and schedule the review. Typically, we divide the one hour time slot into as many as 4 quick tests, leading users from all areas of the newsroom through a task-based study.

Since starting the user review in Q2 2023, it has become an expected ceremony that product partners rely on for design direction and next steps. Each designer gained more practice and confidence in user testing, with a couple team members conducting usability tests for the first time. We’ve documented over 75 research insights in Dovetail, with 18 total user review sessions and 7 research projects conducted last year.

When planning research studies, we were not always knowledgeable of all roles and responsibilities in the newsroom and which were most relevant to each project. We needed a standardized way to refer to common user groups across the newsroom, understand their roles, and better target participants for our research studies.

I decided to adapt our research team’s structure for audience typologies to define creator user groups. As part of an ongoing planning tool project, our team defined a few newsroom personas that served as a good starting point. I combed through our existing research insights from previous user reviews to identify patterns across job titles, responsibilities, and tasks. 

I developed six typologies to categorize all creators at the Post, including newsroom, marketing, and audience teams, that use our tools: leadership, top level planners, story teams, platform teams, and support teams. The description, goals, tasks, and tool affinities for these high level groups were verified by stakeholders in publishing support who are experts on newsroom culture and workflows. I documented the typologies in Dovetail so that they could be tagged and referenced within research projects alongside reader-facing typologies. 

Typologies empower our team to see which projects impact both creator and reader user groups, connecting the dots between creator workflows and user needs. These connections strengthened our understanding of how our work directly impacts business goals. Creating a shared language for our groups makes our documentation more clear and user testing efforts more direct.

Creator tools had two entry points for story search—from the WebSked planning tool and from the Ellipsis CMS. These separate experiences created unnecessary friction in newsroom workflows, and redundant overhead for Creator engineering teams.

While functionality and UI enhancements in WebSked search continued to grow, Ellipsis search lagged behind. Additionally, many pages within both tools had low adoption from the newsroom and limited maintenance from engineering.

My product partners and I saw an opportunity to merge these search pages—enabling the newsroom to plan, edit, and publish from one integrated tool. A merged search experience opened the door for a long term tool unification strategy that included improved information architecture of the tools suite, dynamic dashboards with news gathering insights, and a knowledge base of support documentation.

To move this idea forward, I hosted a brainstorming session with the Creator tools product lead Stephen Mefford, and Sr. Staff Product Designer Patrick Slawinski. We defined opportunities for unifying various workflows and entry points, and mapped out next steps for three key goals. This session paved the way for a larger discussion with newsroom partners about the future of newsroom tooling.