Howdy
Hearst’s content distribution tool provides a simple and elegant platform to build and send feeds to Hearst’s many external partners.
HOWDY
Hearst’s content distribution tool provides a simple and elegant platform to build and send feeds to Hearst’s many external partners.
̌
Historically, content distribution had been a challenge as Hearst did not have an integrated system to build and send feeds. Issues we faced:
Reports with partial visibility as to why a record is ineligible for a partner.
We had no visibility into unsupported embeds.
We built automatic feeds that sent too little or too much content.
Howdy was designed to provide an outwardly simple solution to these very complex issues. The Howdy user sets up a partner and answers a few questions about the outputs required to get the desired image shape/size, content and what embeds can be supported.
As the Design Lead for Howdy, I was involved in all phases from its conception. I performed all the preliminary strategic work, user research, interviews and Design Thinking exercises leading up to the creation of wireframes. As a team, we had all key stakeholders participate in workshops and interviews to glean necessary user information.
Howdy’s initial design was created in Proto.io for quick user testing.
Eventually MVP visual designs were laid out in a combination of Sketch and in-browser.
In this video, we see a collection of filtered deliverable content being sent out to a partner. Thanks to Howdy’s presets, users do not need to worry about unsuitable content being delivered. The end goal of Howdy is to generate clean and eligible content for Hearst’s many outside partners and have our internal team spend less time poring over spreadsheets.
