Increasing Console Usability with a CMS-Based Architecture
Redesigning navigation to manage growing content, without frictionOverview:Amity Social Cloud is an SDK product supporting social and communication modules. As new features shipped and upgraded throughout the year, users increasingly struggled to manage them through the existing admin console. This project redesigned the console to improve usability today and establish a design framework for future growth.
Contribution:Led design from concept to ship partnered with stakeholders to align product strategy with user needs and business goals
Research led research to uncover the core structural problem
Facilitated principle setting alignment with stakeholders to reduce mid-project direction changes
Problems:
1
Fragmented mental model
Features were added incrementally, with no consistent structure connecting them.
2
Conflicting personas
New use cases needed support without breaking what existing users already relied on.
3
Inefficient information handling
The console pushed users through a linear, pipeline-like flow instead of letting them access data types directly.
Design principles:
Before diving into design, we aligned with stakeholders on a shared set of principles. Business priorities shifted often throughout the project, new personas, new feature requests, changing timelines, so having agreed-upon principles up front gave the team a stable reference point to evaluate every decision against, rather than going back and forth on direction with every change
Seamless, not just simple
Consistent experience between the client side and the admin console.
Transparent and informative
Give users the information and context they need to complete tasks confidently, every step of the way.
Consistent with what's coming
Align with the company's new visual identity without blowing the dev timeline.
Reusable by default
Every new component has to work across the platform, with minimal added development effort.
Solution
A CMS-based architecture
Research showed that Social Cloud's products and a CMS share the same underlying data types such as content pages, posts, messages, media, comments, and so on.
Instead of drilling users through a pipeline, a CMS structure gives each data type its own dedicated space. This lets admins manage large volumes of information in parallel, rather than one linear step at a time.
Designs:
Navigation
Console navigation is customizable per product's functionality. For platform-level solutions, a double-panel layout works best which gives each feature category its own space without overwhelming the user.
Dashboard template
To speed up design and development, content areas were grouped into three reusable templates based on available components: Listing, Group Dashboard, and Settings.
Navigation
Console navigation is customizable per product's functionality. For platform-level solutions, a double-panel layout works best which gives each feature category its own space without overwhelming the user.
Dashboard template
To speed up design and development, content areas were grouped into three reusable templates based on available components: Listing, Group Dashboard, and Settings.
Impacts:Faster, more confident content management
Admins could manage multiple content layers (pages, posts, messages, media) in parallel instead of moving through them one at a time. What used to take a linear, step-by-step path became something users could navigate directly, cutting down time spent hunting for the right screen.
Admins could manage multiple content layers (pages, posts, messages, media) in parallel instead of moving through them one at a time. What used to take a linear, step-by-step path became something users could navigate directly, cutting down time spent hunting for the right screen.
A framework that outlasted the redesign
Because the new structure was built around reusable templates (Listing, Group Dashboard, Settings), teams shipping new features afterward could plug into the existing pattern instead of designing from scratch each time.
Because the new structure was built around reusable templates (Listing, Group Dashboard, Settings), teams shipping new features afterward could plug into the existing pattern instead of designing from scratch each time.
Key Takeaways:
Design for scale Technology moves fast, think ahead to what future features will need, not just what's in front of you.
Words matter Clear, careful copy is as critical to usability as layout.
Understand constraints early Taking time to align with engineering on limitations speeds up the whole process, better solutions come from solving them together.