THOMAS KLEPL

Prior to this project, CBC News and CBC Sports were using an ill-fitting content management system that made it painful for writers to author, publish and manage their content online. It was time for a new system that aligns with users' needs.

A multidisciplinary team was assembled including a product manager, myself as information architect, a technical architect, and a group of end users. Beginning with several discovery sessions, we learned about the range of problems inherent in the old system and compiled a list of stories representing users' needs and wants for the new system. Then, we brought in several vendors to demo their CMS tools. Together, we selected the winning vendor and then proceeded to design modules and screens to be created as well as custom components that needed to be built from scratch. End users were involved throughout the process and the launch was a huge success. The new platform was expanded afterwards to deliver additional tools and features such as the new CBC Radio site.

Information Architect

For this project, I created an architectural model and several new user interfaces to be used by writers, editors and approvers for daily creation and publishing of online news. Due to the size and impact of this important tool, I worked with many other key people from journalists to software architects and developers to ensure that every design was based on the full range of requirements. The outputs of my work included Content Type UIs, Presentational Element UIs, Page Layouts, Dashboard Widget UIs and Workflows.