Discovery

For the discovery session on Preview & Schedule, we prepared a script that focuses on understanding the users' current use cases, pain points and needs. They also showed us their current workflow during the session.

In addition, wprepared few questions regarding Revision History, as the page was closely tied with the preview & and schedule workflow.

During the discovery session, producers from each brand demonstrated their workflow in-depth while we screenrecorded.

Use cases for preview, schedule, and revision history of each brand

• USA: For USA, one of the main use cases of preview was to share it with the stakeholders for review and approval. They considered it important to view all the assets that will be on the page at that specific date and time.
  They are currently having issues with not being able to preview the content that's not in a published state. The content not published shows up as a gray box on both homepage and show pages' preview.
  Schedule was also extensively used to publish the changes in the content type in the future. Show page is the most schedueld content type.
  Revision History is used to see what changed by who, when. When there is a mistake made, they can quickly revert back to the previous version using the history. They also use it to reuse the image assets on the previous version of the promo, as it is complicated and takes a long time to find the exact same photo. Currently, there is no functionality to 'preview' the past versions, but it is a feature that is nice to have.

• Syfy: Syfy often previews and catches the mistakes on Homepage in their staging environment where all the changes that are published appear immediately. They find and fix the mistake immediately before the caching on the live environment reflects the latest changes.
  They currently can't preview Media Gallery and would like to have that functionality. Like USA, they want the ability to share the preview with external parties.
  Syfy mostly uses schedule to make changes to the weekly episode-related contents, such as Inside the Episode galleries, blogs, etc. They use a single nodequeue for the homepage, and they are mostly manually updating this queue. It often takes longer for them to schedule each promo unit to either publish or unpublish than simply removing and adding the promo units at the appropriate time.
  Revision History is used to compare two content types that have the same title and distinguish between the two.

• Bravo: Bravo can preview most of their content types, including Layouts. They currently don't have and want the ability to preview the layout/page on specific date and time.
  For schedule, it is important to have an ability to schedule multiple publish & unpublish actions in advance. They can only schedule the changes in the publish state and can't schedule to make changes in the content type. They think it would be nice to have the functionality as long as it is easy to use.
  Bravo chose not to use Revision History as they don't have a use case for it.

• NBC: NBC doesn't have preview for any of the pages on their site. Their site doesn't have a lot of parts that are configurable by the producers, and the sections where it requires text and image inpupt has Photoshop comps and wiki guides to inform the producers the size of the photos, safe zones, and length of the text. However, the producer we interviewed wanted the preview functionality back, which had the ability to preview the page at a specific date and time.
  They are currently using the basic schedule and revision functionality shipped with Pub7. They it is useful to have the option to publish the scheduled change immediately. They use Revision History to compare the content against the Omniture reports and republishing and rotating the previous versions with certain elements, such as iframes and social embeds.

While rewatching the session videos, we took notes to recapture the brands' current practices, use cases, and needs.