Content Management Systems

A scalable authoring system

I led the design of Next Gen Authoring, a ground-up rethink of a schema-driven CMS editor that made complex content models easier for authors to work with, without limiting how customers structured their data.

SUS improved from 49 → 86, 100% of participants preferred Next Gen, and every customer migrated voluntarily.

Organisation: Amplience · 2023-26
Role: Principal Product Designer
Contribution: End-to-end product design lead · Design system owner
Scope: Core CMS workflows · 200+ customers · Multiple squads

Project summary

From schema to experience

The Legacy editor rendered the underlying schema directly into a form. Schema heterogeneity ruled out fixed page templates. Next Gen needed a scalable system of authoring patterns that interpreted any schema into a usable authoring experience.

Next Gen authoring form showing tabbed navigation, collapsible content groups and paired responsive settings.

Legacy authoring form showing a long continuous sequence of SEO, header, call-to-action and editorial fields.

Research & discovery

The work before the work

Working with the Product Owner and researcher, I synthesised years of customer evidence, ran 6 workshops to test whether structured authoring should be improved or replaced, and audited 6 competing CMS products. I translated lessons from their UX into design principles, refining them with the wider design team through critique and show-and-tells.

Collected institutional knowledge about recurring problems in the authoring experience — Lessons for Next GenCompetitors showed stronger patterns for layout, hierarchy, field behaviour, metadata and contextual actions. Amplience prioritised visuals but used dense forms. Competitors used negative space to create clearer focal points.

System foundations

Tokens and components

I designed the underlying tokens with Dev and the base components needed to reach parity with Legacy, alongside the first pass of Amplience’s platform-wide design system. I analysed each Legacy component in depth, then turned the recurring problems into a system of improvements I could apply consistently as I redesigned them.

Bento collection of Next Generation Authoring basic form components and interaction states — Component design principlesThe improvements became reusable component behaviour: clearer hierarchy, persistent labels, explicit validation states and field sizing that reflected the content.

Authoring patterns

Creating an authoring experience

I combined the base components into repeatable patterns for grouping, hierarchy, arrays, linked content, validation and navigation, designed to work across any customer schema. Authoring-only structures such as tabs let teams organise long forms around real roles and workflows without changing front-end output.

Bento collection of navigation, linked content, arrays and validation patterns in Next Generation Authoring — Repeatable authoring patternsCustomer evidence shaped the details: text and metadata identified linked content, while contextual actions were prioritised by frequency, risk and available space.

Building confidence

SUS 49 → 86. 100% preferred the new experience

Before Beta, the project sponsor challenged the Product Owner and me to prove the redesign was better than Legacy. I owned the validation approach, designing a comparative usability study across both editors. The results gave stakeholders the evidence to support Beta.

System Usability Scale comparison for legacy and Next Generation Authoring — Comparative usabilityParticipants completed the same tasks against realistic customer schemas in both systems, completed SUS for each, explained their scores and named their preferred authoring experience.

Aligning stakeholders and squads

Design trade-offs

Research showed customers liked the freeform page concept but not as a replacement for structured authoring. Engineering judged the full concept too expensive, while Product wanted to protect delivery cadence. I reframed it as a staged release: an array-based MVP using existing patterns. Customer feedback justified more investment in contextual add-anywhere capabilities.

Research and exploration for the Content Palette authoring concept — Designing through delivery constraintsA lower-cost MVP preserved the core idea and created a path to the intended experience.

Product extensions

Specialised authoring patterns

Matrix extended the system to content that conventional forms couldn’t easily serve. Research moved the use case from occasional size guides to frequently updated buyer guides; 2 prospects then made its release a condition of signing.

Research and exploration for the Matrix authoring pattern — Finding the viable use caseTesting with 7 customers exposed the stronger use case. I expanded the spreadsheet model to support imagery and long-form text, with modal editing when more space was needed.

System extension

Stress-testing the system

Applying Next Gen to Scheduling stress-tested the architecture against denser information, tighter layouts and a planning workflow. It showed the system could scale beyond the editor into new product contexts.

Content scheduling experience extending the Next Generation Authoring interaction system into a denser planning workflow — Authoring patterns in SchedulingScheduling reused the core architecture in a denser 3-pane workflow.

Adoption

100% customer migration

I tracked usage, feedback and migration blockers during the parallel rollout, using those signals to improve the experience. Every customer migrated voluntarily before Legacy was retired.

Curated evidence of the Next Generation Authoring rollout, feedback loop and customer migration — Designing for adoption after launchUsage data, feedback and customer contact showed where migration was sticking and what to fix next

Japan Centre content shown as a visual proof point for the Next Generation Authoring system — Real customer complexityA real customer model showing Next Gen organising validation, metadata and editorial content alongside the rendered experience.