Improving content operations across an internal CMS
Doreen Ma
Improving content operations across an internal CMS
Service Design
Internal Operation
Workflow
Role
Product Designer
Platform
Web
Team
1 PM, 1 Engineer, Content Stakeholders
Project Theme
Content operations, workflow design, information retrieval, service mapping
Summary
A series of workflow improvements that reduced navigation, clarified media selection, and supported more reliable video publishing.
Mapped the end-to-end content publishing process.
Consolidated journey and step creation into a more continuous flow.
Designed media search, selection, preview, and metadata access.
Added dashboard search and status filtering.
Problem
Content creators had to navigate a fragmented CMS internal workflow to build journeys, locate existing media, and manage publishing status.Creating a journey step required navigating between separate pages and manually locating media objects, while the dashboard offered limited ways to find and manage published content.
These small points of friction accumulated across a repetitive publishing workflow, increasing operational effort and making the platform harder to learn.
Goal
User goal
Build and manage journeys with less operational effort.
This included keeping journey and step creation within a more continuous flow, making existing media easier to find and verify, and improving dashboard visibility through search and status filters.
An example
Keeping the core task within one continuous flow
Problem
Previously, content creators had to leave the journey workflow and navigate to another part of the CMS to create or configure a step. I brought the step-management interface into the journey page, allowing users to complete the task without losing context or switching between separate tabs.
Before
Create journey → Save → Open stages → Save
Create journeys step page → Create video step → Locate media → Return to journey
After
Create journey → Add stage → Add and configure video step within the same workflow
Impact
Internal Team Impact
Reduced reliance on cross-page navigation during journey creation.
The content operations team reported that the workflow was easy to learn and use.
Product Impact
Optimized CMS workflow for publishing journey steps
Reflection
In legacy internal tool, the greater opportunity was consolidating and cleaning up the workflow
Working within existing Bootstrap components and technical constraints and mapping the broader content-publishing process and collaborating with product, engineering, and content stakeholders, I was able to identify several key but connected improvements. Individually, they were straightforward; together, they made the CMS easier to navigate and use for future content operations.
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Posted Sep 8, 2026
Workflow and CMS improvements that consolidated step creation, improved media search/preview, and reduced navigation to streamline content publishing.
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