Basics

Problem

The Stories product was built to allow governments to share narratives and corresponding data with the public to develop a sense of transparency and invest in public trust. Post-launch we learned of two use cases that seemed to want to be solved together. The first was our customers were using the tool to create stories that were not meant to be exposed publicly. The second was leaders needed a way to review documents internally before they went out to the public.

To solve this customers would really need 2 things: the ability to set permissions on these artifacts and more control on publishing options. The first was blocked by a larger initiative to address permissions at scale, so we chose to focus on publishing controls.

Role

Problem Discovery
Research
Interaction Design
Visual Design

Goals

Drive usage for internal communication
Address low hanging UX inconsistencies
Set up foundations for access control

Process

Because of a lot of moving people and vision collateral, this feature got a little ahead of itself. So we had to take a few steps back to fully understanding the architecture that existed in product, and then to work with engineering, product management, and leadership to reset expectations.

Recipe

How everyone thought it worked

The requirements and goals for the project assumed that the publishing flow worked the same in stories as it did in our other products: there was a single artifact that could be toggled in visibility. Our other products had a similar model but used different language

Assumed Flow

How it actually worked

However, the draft and the published version were not in sync. Publishing created a new separate object from the draft which could be overwritten when you clicked republish.

Actual Flow

Research Insights

Through interviews and observation with heavy users on our Customer Success team, we learned there was confusion on the publishing flow.

Being able to edit without publishing changes was very valuable, but with no indication that edits had been made, that ability wasn’t clear to most users.

republish