Bindy Street, a platform offering curated London guides, initially relied on an internal CMS for their content team. Recognising the growing influence of social media creators, the company envisioned expanding its platform to allow these influencers to create their own London guides. This project focused on transforming the existing CMS into a user-friendly and efficient tool tailored for public curators.

The primary objective was to optimise the guide creation workflow within Bindy Street's CMS to ensure a seamless and intuitive experience for external content creators, enabling faster and more efficient guide development.

As a new Product Designer joining Bindy Street, my initial immersion involved a first-hand UX audit of the existing guide creation process. Emulating a new user, I meticulously documented my experience, capturing screenshots highlighting pain points and areas for improvement. This fresh perspective revealed usability challenges, such as the repetitive workflow and unclear UX writing, which long-term users might have inadvertently adapted to

To deeply understand the content team's experiences, we conducted in-depth interviews with all four members, representing varying levels of CMS proficiency. These conversations explored their daily workflows, frustrations, and suggestions for enhancement. Complementing this, we observed each team member creating guides in real-time, allowing us to identify usability issues within their natural context and ask targeted follow-up questions.

Synthesising the insights from the UX audit and user interviews, we identified recurring themes and translated them into actionable features and fixes. To ensure we addressed the most critical needs, we prioritised these items based on their potential impact and feasibility, validating our prioritisation with the content team to gain their perspective on the most pressing issues. The key themes to come out of this were Repeating steps, Complex flow, template system and flicking between steps to ensure they had correct details.

Leading a collaborative workshop with the design team, we fundamentally re-envisioned the guide creation process. By strategically stripping away redundant steps and intuitively remapping the user journey, we aimed to create a significantly faster and more user-friendly experience grounded in our research findings. This resulted in a dramatic reduction from nine steps to a streamlined four-step process, directly addressing the need to eliminate back-and-forth navigation and remove unnecessary complexities.

Following the definition of the refined user flow, I developed low-fidelity wireframes to visualise the proposed structural and navigational changes to the CMS interface. Presenting these initial designs to the tech team provided crucial early feedback on technical feasibility. While the full scope of these changes was deemed beyond the current development cycle, these wireframes served as a valuable blueprint, communicating our future vision for an optimized creator experience.

Recognising the immediate need for impactful improvements within the existing technical constraints, we strategically shifted our focus to 'quick-wins' that would immediately expedite the guide creation process and enhance the experience for first-time users. This involved creating high-fidelity designs that directly addressed the identified pain points of repeating steps and a convoluted flow. We incorporated contextual help, tooltips, and intuitive navigation throughout the workflow. These designs were then translated into interactive prototypes, which underwent rigorous testing with the content team to gather valuable feedback and iterate on the UI before developer handoff.

Throughout the CMS development, I maintained close collaboration with the Web team, ensuring seamless communication and proactively addressing any implementation challenges to facilitate efficient delivery. Post-launch, we conducted a valuable retro workshop with the content team and core users to rigorously evaluate the effectiveness of the implemented changes and identify any remaining areas for improvement. This was complemented by a retrospective with the Web team to assess the success of our collaborative approach and identify key learnings for future cross-functional projects.

The project successfully positioned the CMS to effectively onboard new curators, with the content team expressing significant appreciation for the updates, reporting a noticeably faster guide creation process and a substantial reduction in previous frustrations.