Medical College of Wisconsin

The goal of the MCW redesign was to attempt to create a shared toolkit and platform that could empower a broad range of individual content editors and various departments with the creative freedom to craft whatever they needed while still unifying the brand aesthetic.

Team

My Role: Lead Frontend Developer

Full Team:

• 1 UX Designers/Strategist
• 1 Client Product Owner
• 2 Designers
• 1 Project Manager
• 4 (or more) Internal Devs
• 1 QA Analyst

FE Tech/Tooling

Since this was a site that was meant to be very component-based, I decided to set up some tooling that focused on UI components and allowed for basic frontend development outside of the full sitecore environment. In this case I decided to try out pattern lab which is kinda a precursor to things like storybook.js and the early version I was using most likely built everything via gulp if I recall correctly.

Key Features

1. Robust design system with a broad range of components
2. Most components had at least one or two passes at identifying edge cases and configuration options
3. Setup to allow the creation of easily theme-able microsites
4. The client site product ownership was solid

Challenges

1. Initial approved designs were strict in what they would allow in terms of content on most components, favoring content control to maintain design integrity
2. The component that allows a single column of rich text was considered an afterthought
3. As content entry and migration ramped up, many of the initially tightly controlled components were changed to WYSIWYG editors, essentially allowing content editors to upend design integrity
4. A broad range of content editors and departments weren't always on board with the new system

Takeaways

The sheer scope and size of this website, in association with the number of different content editors and departments caused what might be the worst case of a real world content vs an idealized design conflict that I've seen. Actually, that's not quite true, I've seen worse, but I've never seen worse at this scale. Fortunately, we did have a sizeable maintenance contract on this project, so post launch, we generally did have a chance to fix the vast majority of the major issues, tighten up some components, add more options to others, and generally smooth out most of the initial issues.