During my 8 years with CBC I worked on many projects and won several awards across Canada. The primary goal of redesigning the regional templates was to provide a user-friendly landing page that aggregated regional content while improving navigation and ease of use. My role was to work with stakeholders in BC, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edwards Island in order to design a single template for regional news and current affairs. At the time, the regional portals' news content was static HTML making for an inconsistent user experience from region to region. The secondary goal was to clean up the excessive number of pages and links that saw very little or no traffic.To kick this off I interviewed my local content authors including journalists, editors, radio hosts and technicians.
We held several information architecture workshops with regions across Canada where we mapped out the well-functioning sections, and determined the common denominators between the many regional portals and pages. Ongoing engagement with regional stakeholders was an important component as each region had their own priorities.Once the essential parts of the old website were defined, we started rethinking the website’s logic and structure.
One of our challenges was understanding where the user journey diverged from news to current affairs and local features and articles in order to facilitate a ‘hyper-local’ user experience. In this phase, we designed the regional landing pages before the final portal structure and design were finalized. Once the landing page was launched, we designed and developed the rest of the regional pages Program, Weather etc…) keeping the local stakeholder feedback and original logic in mind. We recruited people from several regions to test our design solutions. Ongoing iterations of the design ensured the new portals were easy to understand and navigate.As a result, the same iterative process was used to develop a reusable template for the regional elections including a robust set of interactive features to help users understand candidate and party platform.
