Our users are HR content writers and managers responsible for overseeing content for the People Portal and the HR Knowledge Base (HRKB). The People Portal provides employee-facing content about life at Facebook, while the HRKB serves as a global resource for HR professionals, offering reference materials and employee resolution information.
However, these content writers and managers faced challenges due to inconsistent implementation of the People Portal and HRKB across various tools and platforms.
The opportunity was to design a user-friendly, unified CMS solution that would allow content owners to create and update content efficiently, enable distributed publishing across platforms, and ensure consistent structure and presentation of content components across systems and audiences.
This solution addressed the key challenge faced by content writers and managers: the inconsistent implementation of the People Portal and HRKB across different tools and platforms.
Using the schema as my primary source of truth, I began by organizing the information based on my initial understanding.
I then brought this list to a collaborative whiteboarding session with Meta stakeholders, who provided valuable insights into how these content fields should be utilized and structured.
With a clearer understanding of how the fields functioned together, I sketched initial concepts to validate the design direction.
Over the course of eight weeks I utilized XDS, Meta’s internal design component library, and created a 55-screen clickable prototype, actualizing the 120+ data point requirements in to a working interface.
I met with Meta stakeholders and design leadership throughout the week to present progress and gather their feedback.
I improved the initial designs and continued creating additional flows related to the content templates. Below is a walkthrough of the final product solutions.
Content writers are constantly making updates to current articles. To maintain user understanding, the templates are flexible and will retain the same structure for creating new articles or editing existing ones.
The templates feature a structure menu of organized groupings which hold all of the required data points and content fields that need to be populated for an article to be published, turning green, once filled. Work would be auto-saved and will always be able to be previewed.
Authoring & Ownership where content creator would select the relevant article and program owners - these details align with the content governance model for authoring and reviewing an article before publishing.
The template tags that the content writer adds powers the metadata for article and allows content to be served on other surfaces, aligning with the HR content taxonomy.
Content sections would be dynamic based on the type of article surface and content the user is writing about.
In addition to accounting for required fields, we iterated on net-new features that could help expedite and simplify a content creators work with modular template blocks – allowing content writer to utilize save templates, and to create and save new ones.
A People Portal and HRKB article follows a certain structure dependent on the article surface, topic, and template. I utilized this tagging component to identify what the content writer should be focusing their text on.
When learning about my persona’s use cases across platforms, it was evident we needed an easy way to allow writers to include variable content that could be dynamically adjusted depending on the end-user. I created this Variable Content module to allow a writer to create default and variable text, as well as set conditions that need to be true in order to display the variable text.
I accounted for how these templates would scale across the lifecycle of an article and incorporated features that give access to version and update history for reference.
People Portal and HRKB articles both follow a choreographed approval process between different roles. Due to this nature, the dashboard use cases varied and needed to be customized to user’s needs.
To date, approvals were communicated and completed in an ad hoc, disjointed fashion. I reimagined how the article CMS could transform in to a “Review” or “Update” state to allow users to review changes, leave or respond to comments, and approve or send back changes to be further improved.