MTV NEWS MULTI AUTHOR
UI, UX, QA
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The MTV News editorial team uses WordPress to publish their posts, and as the editorial team grew and started contributing a wider variety of content, their back-end WordPress tools needed improvement to accommodate their growth.
Most long-form content and interactive posts for have a variety of contributors from main authors, secondary authors, photo and video credits, etc., and the back-end tools had no way to support multi-author and credited posts. My team worked together to solve how the WordPress tools system handles posts with a single author, two authors, three-plus authors, and artists credits.
Because the current tools didn't support multi-author siuations, the editorial team was forced to create a new author profile in the WordPress back-end combining their names every time they published a multi- author post. This hurts the author in many ways:
- No Visual Representation - Combined name accounts don't have author images which are important to the design and the users for scanability
- Missing Posts from Author Hub - Each author has a hub page linked to all of their work, but combined name accounts don't link to the author's hub page
- Missing Credits for Artists - Contributing artists like photographers, videographers, etc. don’t have any way to be automatically credited for their work and have to be manually entered in each post, resulting in inconsistent designs and credits on each post page
3 SCENARIOS
Given the wide variety of scenarios possible for a post (one main author with three assistant authors, two main authors with artist credits, twelve main equal authors, etc.), we provided post page and accompanying card solutions for the 3 main scenarios:
SCENARIO 1
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One Author - Displays the one authors image and name with link to profile on card and post page
SCENARIO 2
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Two Authors - Displays both authors image and name with links to profiles on card and post page
SCENARIO 3
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Three + Authors - Displays one MTV logo image and “MTV News Team” name on card and each authors names with links to profiles on post page
ARTIST CREDITS
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By linking the artist credits to the bottom of the post detached from the author bio lock-up, they are easy to input into each scenario, when applicable, without affecting the design
