The project started in 2015 and had the mission of changing how globo.com published its content, building a new content management system (CMS). A big team of managers, UX designers, software engineers, and developers was formed, and I was one of them.
The way we published and managed our content demanded high maintenance. There were three different publishing platforms (CMS) supporting three different products, and 90% of the features on these systems were identical to each other. Each of these features had to be developed 3 times, even when they had the same function. The business problem was: that the development process was very expensive.
That wasn't enough to start the process to unify the CMS platforms, though. We needed to know the publishers: who they were, which tools they used, and what were their demands and goals. We needed to understand the entire process, from top to bottom.
Our universe is approximately 350 publishers in three different products, using quantitative and qualitative methods we expected to identify opportunities to improve the publishing process and content performance.
Quantitative method:
Online survey (71% answers rate)
Data Analysis of the previous CMS system (google analytics and proprietary database)
Log analysis of Globo Service (a system where users reported bugs, malfunction, and miss conceptions about the previous CMS) and User Voice (channel where users can give suggestions about company tools)
Qualitative method:
17 interviews with publishers (13 journalists and 4 managers)
04 different publisher offices
02 interviews with customer service for the publishers' team
We found five different user profiles/ personas
We discovered a common workflow for all the profiles
We found our constraints:
Evaluating the previous CMS we counted 99 components (sum of features of all three platforms), after removing duplicities and miss-conceptions we found 12 core components. It was enough to cover 80% of publishing case scenarios.
Publishers are users and partners. This partnership was super important to building a strong and functional platform. When it was released the adoption of the new platform was exceptional, people were proud to be part of the process.
Backstage is now the main CMS at Globo.com, the expectation is the tool adoption by the entire Globo Group in the next couple of years. To go even bigger we need to keep learning and improving, the progress is coming as a strong metric plan, KPI monitoring, and user feedback.
Selected Works
Globoplay2020 // Video streaming product
Globolive2019 // Video streaming product
Rethinking News Consumption2018 // News media
Backstage CMS2018 // Publishing platform