Geoff Bell

Project Overview

Topics were to be introduced to the Oak platform, with a similar function as tags that would normally be used in blogs, a topic would need to be created prior to the news article it would be linked to. In order to do this, a management screen/system would be required to be designed and built prior to topics being released.

My Contributions

I was the primary designer on the project so the vast majority of work for this project was created by myself, although it was decided that we could utilise an existing menu feature in the Oak platform. I planned out the user flow, creating wireframes and the final UI design.

Ideation

Following a brainstorm, it was established that there'd only be 1 type of user that would likely use the Topic Manager. This user would likely be an admin type role that wouldn't neccessarily author news posts but would administer the news content. With this in mind, I worked on the user flow to see what actions they would perform throughout the process of managing topics.

As mentioned previously, it was also decided that I'd be able to utilise a pre-existing feature in Oak as the foundation for this management system. It was necessary to make some improvements to the usability of this feature, as well as some visual improvements as well.

Due to issues with how hierarchy was displayed by the feature we'd be using as a foundation, I did my own research into information architecture on the best way to display child elements and used this to inform the design.

The Design

Following some rough wireframe sketching, I then proceeded to design the mock ups with the user flow helping to inform what each screen should look like.

Feedback & learnings

Despite seeming like a fairly straightforward feature, there was some debate about certain aspects of the search functionality and how it should work, before the Development Team quashed it entirely. I think it would have been beneficial to involve the developers earlier on in the process to get feedback from them on the viablility of some of the designs.