Bindy Street: Creator Platform
Scaling Content Creation: Building a CMS Creators Could Actually Use
Web Application
2023 (3 Months)
Bindy Street
Lead Product Designer
Setting the Challenge
Bindy Street, a platform for curated London guides, wanted to expand from an internal writing team to social media creators who could publish guides themselves. The challenge: the CMS powering the platform had only ever been used internally and wasn’t designed for external curators.
My role was to redesign this CMS so it felt intuitive, fast, and approachable for non-technical creators, enabling the brand to scale its content without bottlenecks.
Starting From Zero: The UX Audit
Experiencing the CMS blind surfaced confusing copy, redundant steps, and unclear flows that long-term users had normalised.
To preserve a fresh perspective, I wasn’t given access to the CMS before the audit. My first interaction with the product mirrored the experience of a brand-new creator.
That restriction turned into a strength. From the first clicks, I encountered confusing UX copy, redundant steps, and an unclear publishing flow — issues the internal team had adapted to but which would quickly overwhelm external creators.
Seeing Through Creators’ Eyes
Repetition, context switching, and an unmanageable template system were the biggest barriers to fast, confident guide creation.
To validate these findings, I ran live interviews with four content creators at different CMS experience levels. Watching them create guides revealed frustrations invisible in documentation:
Repetitive editing loops — re-entering the same details multiple times
Frequent context switching — jumping back and forth between sections to complete a single task
Broken template system — any edit to a template was treated as a new one, leading to thousands of near-duplicate templates and making the system impossible to manage
From the audit and interviews, I mapped these issues into themes and worked with the team to prioritise solutions by impact vs. feasibility. This collaborative exercise ensured we focused on changes that directly improved productivity without overwhelming development.
Cutting the Clutter: Redesigning the Flow
Reducing the flow from nine steps to four eliminated redundant actions and gave creators a clearer, faster path to publishing.
In a design workshop, we cut the guide creation process from nine steps down to four. By removing redundancy and restructuring the journey, we created a smoother, more intuitive flow.
I translated these changes into low-fidelity wireframes, sharing them early with developers to ground the vision in technical feasibility. This avoided wasted design effort on ideas outside the project’s scope.
Ambition Meets Reality: Wireframing & Concept Exploration
Sharing broad explorations early aligned the team on a long-term vision — but also exposed which ideas were unrealistic to deliver in the near term.
After streamlining the flows, I developed a wide range of low-fidelity wireframes to explore potential solutions. These concepts covered improvements to navigation, template management, and publishing workflows.
We shared these wireframes with both the content team and engineering team. The sessions surfaced valuable feedback: while the concepts aligned with the long-term vision, many of the changes were deemed out of scope for the immediate roadmap due to technical constraints.
Pivoting With Purpose: Detailed Design
By pivoting to targeted fixes — from repetitive editing loops to UX copy and template management — we delivered meaningful value fast while keeping the CMS launch-ready for external curators.
Faced with scope constraints, we had to strip the project back while still making the CMS viable for external curators and improving workflows for the internal team.
This meant revisiting the pain points uncovered in the audit and interviews and asking: What can we solve now, within constraints, that will deliver the most value?
The detailed designs focused on:
Clearer UX copy to reduce confusion for new creators
Tooltips and contextual help to guide users through key actions
UI refinements that simplified navigation and reduced context switching
Template management adjustments to limit duplication and clutter
Reducing repetitive editing loops so creators didn’t have to re-enter the same details multiple times
These refinements were tested with the content team to validate their impact and iterated quickly before handoff.
From Vision to Reality: Launch & Impact
Close collaboration during and after launch ensured adoption was smooth and improvements continued beyond release.
During development, I worked closely with the web team to resolve implementation challenges quickly. After launch, I facilitated retros with both content and web teams to capture feedback and refine further.
The results were clear:
Guide creation became significantly faster (process cut nearly in half)
Frustration dropped thanks to clearer navigation and a manageable template system
Creators gained confidence to use the tool independently without support
Lessons I Carried Forward
This project reinforced lessons that shape how I work today:
Evaluate before you build — exploring off-the-shelf solutions first can save resources.
Clarity in design files is essential — unclear documentation during scope changes caused unnecessary rework.
Flexibility creates momentum — delivering incremental improvements built trust and kept progress visible even within constraints.
