PROJECT BACKGROUND
The Workspace is one of the core feature of Red Pulse Platform. Red Pulse recruits numerous writers to write on our platform. It is a professional platform targeting on industry experts, practitioners, and professionals, thus we review every piece of content from writers. The Workspace is the place to complete content publishing process and connects all the stakeholders involved in content producing.
Personas
The first thing I needed to figure out was how many roles would be involved in producing contents.
Admin - Who has complete permissions and oversees all the activities of others.
Writer - There are 3 levels of writers. The work flow will be different for writers in corresponding levels.
Tier 1 Writers
Tier 2 Writers
Contributors
Supervisor - Who is responsible for approving, rejecting articles, and assign writers and editors.
Editor - Edit submitted articles.
Translator - Translate articles.
I then created personas for individual role.
Personas were conducted together with product manager and research team (which responsible for manage involved roles and publishing articles) to analyze user goals and needs of features for the platform. The user scenario workshop helped set the pathway for initial version by thoroughly understand user requirements and usability.
User Flow & permissions
The work flow is most challenging aspect of the project due to the number of roles and complex of process. Analysts from research team were interviewed to help create the flow chat.
Action-based Flow Chart
The action-based flow chart indicates the actions that different roles of users make to publish an article. This flow chart provides a clear route based on what action a user makes.
Status-based Flow Chart
While action has to be made by users, change of status can be done by the system automatically. Thus it is needed an other flow chart to describe status change of an article.
Status-Action Table
In each status, users with different roles are able to make actions to the article. To provide a clear sheet of what users can do in each status help development team to correctly develop as requirements.
Status-visible Table
This Status-visible table helps understand the scope of things a user is able to see according to the status and permission
Design Consideration
Once the user flow was worked out, I started crafting the design to make sure users would have the best experiences during the complicated process.
Considering users were using excel previously to complete such job. I try to move the same experience on the workspace. Now, users can directly add a new source on the table and edit directly as well instead of enter a new page or pop-up to edit.
To save users’ time, we make the table expandable to see all information.
Due to the number of columns, I designed fixed Title and Action column for better use of the table.
All actions made would be notified by system feedback. I always keep the principle in mind that users should always aware system status.