Building A Content Model

Role: Lead content designer

Team: Frontier Communications

The challenge

Create a content model for Frontier Communications. Educate stakeholders across the business on the value of content models and use the model to unify product content and improve speed to market.

The solution

I built a robust content model for the business and took it on a roadshow to educate product, marketing, IT, UX, and CX on the value of content models. Then, I used the model to develop a templated approach for launching and maintaining product data, helping to reduce product launch timelines.

Context

Business partners were looking for a way to streamline and accelerate product launches. Product content was fragmented and stored in different locations for the MyFrontier app and frontier.com. This setup slowed down development and forced content authors to manage product content in multiple locations.

The process

To solve this problem, I knew we needed a templated, scalable, repeatable, and organized framework. First, I built a content model to illustrate the relationships between Frontier’s products, plans, equipment, and more. The model is independent of platforms like the app or website.

Next, I defined the content types and their attributes. I performed a content audit of digital and physical marketing materials and web and app content to define the attributes. Then, I held workshops with product and marketing stakeholders to walk them through the content model, content types, and attributes.

My primary goals for the workshops were:

  1. Educate stakeholders on the value of a content model and content types.

  2. Demonstrate how we could apply the model to accelerate product launches.

  3. Validate the content types and attributes.

It’s important to know attributes can be used for any medium. Whether we’re working on a direct mail piece or a promotional screen in the app, content is standardized in the content type templates.

Applying the model

Frontier launched several value-added services, also known as VAS, before I developed the model. Content for these products was stored in different locations. App content was stored on a WordPress server, and web content was stored on Sitecore, our CMS.

In the workshops with product and marketing, I demonstrated how we could define a VAS content template and use it to unify our data. I also showed the stakeholders how this repeatable template could reduce the time it would take to launch a product.

By standardizing product attributes, the product and marketing teams now had guardrails when developing briefs and product messaging. My team could then apply messaging to the template and fast-track legal and brand approvals.

On the development side, WordPress templates were set up with fields for each attribute. Fields were mapped to the app and frontier.com through custom APIs. When a new product is requested, the development teams can duplicate the template and add the data from our product template. We also asked that product names and prices be pulled from back-end systems. This saved the business countless resource hours and cut project timelines for price or product changes in half.

Below, you can see an example of how a template is mapped to UI in the app and frontier.com.