Pearson — Bronte Publishing
The publishing platform Bronte is an internal product used at Pearson, allowing content authors to import or directly create a text and prepare it for publication in the Pearson ecosystem. Bronte is a feature-rich tool. Complete with text editing, image manipulation, layout tools, project management, and deployment. My remit was to improve the publication process. The goal was to reduce the various points an author was required to navigate to and create a flow tightly coupled with other project and content management features.
The publishing workflow was tedious and time-consuming, compelling the author to navigate to two separate parts of the tool's project management interface to publish the work to Pearson's eText management ecosystem and beyond to their public marketplace.
Below is a set of questions I set out to circumscribe the issues related to a publishing workflow:
Publishing a Course or Lesson is difficult and requires multiple steps. As a content creator/manager, I want this process to be less time-consuming
Secondary: Does the UI need a dedicated tab/screen in the workspace view to surface a set of published courses?
Versions, and their potential to become unwieldy According to stakeholders and admins, the versions, while ultimately useful are rarely deleted. This might necessitate a cultural shift in workflows.
Is having many (10s-100s) of Published items a problem? Over 50 might be an edge case and rarely the norm.
Caveats we were keen to observe:
Where is Publication metadata data and how is it accessed?
What happens when we need to publish again
more reliance on content creators to know and explore UI for subtle functionality
My proposed solution was to bring the publishing process into the project management interface activated via a kebab menu interaction alongside other available actions on the file.
Once the publication process is finished, the content author can access the published document and its metadata. The author will receive visual indicators showing whether the publication was successful or not, along with user information and the type of publication, such as eText, ePub, or ePub 3. The location within the Pearson ecosystem where the publication is found, such as staging, QA, or production, is also displayed.
As a general rule, we created specification sheets for all proposed components. We needed to outline specifically where there are state changes, subsequent animations, etc.
A critical part of the team's process was to produce specifications for state and accessibility. In the following examples, I produced artifacts that covered all possible states of buttons and tab order, with careful attention to hover, focus and the combined state of having both focus and being hovered.
Publishing
Problems to Solve
Design Discovery
Initial visual design and prototype
Publication Progress Modals
Publication Complete
Artifacts
Accessibility & Tab Order
