Mail Online

Assignments/ Role:

Within this role, I am senior UX architect on a variety of Mail Online content publishing web application enhancements as well as internal supporting tools. Occasionally my work spans across other Mail Online public facing products (desktop, mobile web, mobile app), and METRO brand products.

The content publishing web application serves a global audience of approximately 800 users. Functions and features of the content publishing web application ranges widely and includes:
Feature articles editor, channel (category) editor, article editor, video editor, puffs editor

Other supporting tools include:
SEO dashboard, Keywords editor

I enjoy collaborating with colleagues (of different nationality and culture) within the Mail Online brand to come up with solutions that have been implemented and have improved end users’ and business productivity.

The Mail Online UX team is set up where UX architects and UX visual designers are under the same team. As senior UX, I always enjoy:

• exchanging ideas and knowledge with UX visual designers
• sharing UX events that might interest team members
• sharing different types of UX courses and career paths ahead for junior team members
• exploring new ways of approaching challenges

Challenges:

Working with the MOL brand presents challenges in the form of: 

• Working around constraints and burdens of legacy internal publishing tools
• Championing extremely busy end users who have abundance of user feedback – finding the right methods to understand their challenges 
• Technically risk averse stakeholders who feels secure in the face of familiar interfaces
• Fine balance between improving software functionality and incremental improvements within business and technical constraints
• Being resourceful when resource is scarce

Typical Team Setup:

• Project Manager
• Developers
• UX Visual Designer
• UX Architect – June Lim
• Product Owner
• Product Users

UX Activities:

• Weekly team catch ups
• Project kick-off meetings
• Requirements & constraints discussions
• Collaborative design sessions
• Ad-hoc end user feedback/ corridor user testings
• Contextual research
• Application new feature demo sessions
• On-going project team collaboration for discussions & negotiations

UX Deliverables:

• User or system flows
• Use cases & goals
• Sketches / Whiteboard exercise
• Static wireframes
• Low fidelity prototypes to illustrate flow & interaction
• UX QA & feedback during application deployment phases – JIRA

Interested to learn about what I really do in this role? Leave me a message and let's arrange for a chat.

Internal Publishing Tool User Feedback: