Content Studio
I’ spent over a year as the sole designer to the development of Content Studio. It serves as an exceptional tool for our customers to delve into Cornerstone’s diverse content options, aiding them in making informed purchasing decisions. In the past, organizations faced considerable difficulties when it came to discovering and acquiring content from various vendors, as well as generating meaningful engagement with the right material.
By leveraging the power of AI-driven search and consumption metrics, Content Studio offers a seamless experience of curating highly impactful and captivating content, complemented by valuable insights crucial for achieving success. Through its comprehensive filters, this platform efficiently identifies the most suitable content that aligns with organizational requirements.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Create a solution that addresses shortcomings in content discovery, eliminates reliance on flimsy portals, and hastens our antiquated curation process.
The confusion around our content
Simply put, there is way too much of it and it is nearly impossible to browse in a meaningful way. The search page is infinitely scrollable, caps out at 10k results, and has no distinction for new or trending content. To make the situation worse, filter’s are merely suggestions, and content cards don’t distinguish important data for curators: languages, modalities and provider. The frustration from our customers to easily select and review relevant content is plateable throughout the corporation.
To address shortfalls in content discovery, partner onboarding, and subscription management, the sales and curation teams requested rapidly built portals on our aging CMS from 2010. I designed, coded and maintained these portals using a combination of spaghetti code & hope. If these portals ever broke, I would be notified within 10 minutes which is a testament to how heavily they were being utilized and how badly Cornerstone needed a better solution.
Our curation team was relying on a combination of excel sheets & pdf catalogs to organize, adjust and curate our many subscriptions. The image on the left is one of the catalogs they used to rely on. The process to curate one subscription would often take a few months and was prone to mistakes due to metadata mismatches. Needless to say, this curation method was archaic and needed updating in order to improve “time on task KPIs.
Defining our personas
Content Prospect
Users who seek out content to fulfill the specific needs of their organizations’ business requirements who are looking for an easier way to discover relevant content in our ecosystem.
CUSTOMER CURATOR
Users responsible for the acquisition, curation, distribution, maintenance, engagement, and overall success of content investments within their organization who need an easier way to curate content playlists.
CUSTOMER LEADER
Users who aspire to invest in and drive the success (ROI) of content that aligns with their business objectives, learning strategies, and employee upskilling who need to gain useful insights on their orgs content performance.
CORNERSTONE INTERNAL
Sales, curation, support, and Customer Success Managers who need to enhance the customer experience throughout the entire journey, from prospecting clients to ongoing operations and renewals.
CONTENT PARTNERS
Content providers who need an intuitive platform to organize, update, manage, and monetize their content, while gaining insights to optimize their content offerings and increase engagement.
Integrating other services & mapping out a plan
Content studio was designed to work harmoniously within our product ecosystem. It started by piping in employee data from other core products. Then It would reference the data against our skills database while leveraging our AI engine to scan the content library for suitable recommendations. The end product would be playlists and assigned training that would be pushed back out to all of our products.
We were meticulous in creating a site map for Content Studio since we needed to ensure that we accounted for every side interaction that accompanied our 3 major user journeys. Below is the site map for our configuration area, which also happens to be our least complicated. The other site maps are simply too large to fit on this page in a meaningful way.
Execution
Building the beast
We constructed a monstrous interactive flow over a number of months. Every user journey had to be accounted for along with every filter dropdown and toast message. This is because it was being presented to hundreds of clients onstage during Cornerstone’s Convergence convention. The interactive demo had to be as true to life as possible and I think the final product delivered on this. I built and maintained a complicated component library that leveraged extensive variants and variables to expedite quick UI adjustments.
Discovery journey
Designed for
Customer Curator
Curation journey
Designed for
Customer Curator
Insights journey
Designed for
Customer Leader
Addressing pain points through rigorous testing
We had to conduct thorough testing of our detailed interactive demo to ensure it catered to the diverse needs and preferences of our user personas. Filters, navigation, and hierarchy were constantly adjusted to ensure the most efficient experience.
fun details
Improving upon the system
With its foundation rooted in Cornerstone’s flair component library, Content Studio has been granted the freedom to revamp and modernize components to align with our requirements. This self-contained component library has played a vital role in expediting the modernization process of components in the main flair library as well as setting a new standard for how future components are designed at Cornerstone. Despite its vast and comprehensive nature, the component library effectively avoids the memory problems typically encountered in Figma’s interactive compositions.
Clients seem to love it!
Senior Learning Technology Analyst
Content Studio provides all the details we need in one screen and then allows us to curate, review and publish in one place.
Instructional Designer
Content Studio will make it easy for our L&D team to curate content, get better insight into new content we don’t currently have and receive AI-based content recommendations that align with the employee’s role, career path and business goals.
Learning Experience Designer
Being able to easily review content, without affecting transcripts, will allow our team to make more strategic decisions surrounding our content strategy and consistently publish the right content collections to the right users at the right time.
Global Learning and Development
Thank you
Content Studio empowers leaders and administrators to be future-forward, explore what’s possible, make informed purchasing decisions, and ultimately connect development goals with our company vision.