CNN Global UX Architecture

Unifying Templates, Driving Engagement, and Optimizing Publishing Originally tasked with fixing fragmented page structures, I led CNN’s UX strategy for global content transformation. Through analytics, template alignment, and editorial partnership, we delivered a scalable system that improved engagement, publishing velocity, and cross-regional consistency. Key Contributions: Standardized global templates and migrated disparate page formats into a centralized CMS. Leveraged Adobe Analytics to audit engagement patterns and prioritize layout improvements. Created reusable components and visual frameworks that supported international editorial needs. Partnered with senior leadership and newsroom stakeholders to reimagine how content is created, edited, and consumed. Improved time-to-publish and design consistency for both US and international CNN properties.

PROCESS

The inventory audit quickly lead to something greater - making sense of which patterns were the "best practice", guided heavily by intelligence from the Analytics team. By slowly phasing out the "one-off" pieces of real estate in the library, we were able to make better decisions about what the pattern of the sites key pages should be backed up by real data insights. I did deep discovery on which parts of the website were working well in order to bring those to light when creating "net new" experiences.

RESEARCH

Working alongside Research and Analytics team members we were able to determine that users truly feel into 5 core buckets, ranked in the following way when measuring volume and profitability.

Ritualizers

Searchers

Fanatics

Participants

Escapists

personas

We began looking more judiciously at marking pages into zones to meet the personas.

BLOG STRATEGY

BEFORE

As the Pattern Library work was getting tightened up, we wanted to turn our focus to implementing those learning in a CMS that was easy to manipulate - the Blogs that represented the TV shows at CNN and special interests.

60% of the page views on CNN are generated from these activity, so cleaning up the way they were built and speeding the time to market was to be a quick win.

RESULTS

INCREASE

Page Views per user
Sharing per user
Video views per user
Speed to Market

DECREASE

Abandon Rate
Overall Administration inefficiency

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