Research

Project Management

Visual Design

UX Design

The M Dash

Designing a custom, modular content management system along with a full visual refresh for M.M.LaFleur’s digital magazine.

Background

M.M.LaFleur is a women’s fashion brand specializing in functional and stylish clothing for work. M.M.LaFleur uses The M Dash, their digital magazine, to share career advice and style inspiration to current and potential customers.

By the Numbers

• About 50,000 monthly sessions

• About 100 monthly direct transactions

• 85% of readers have purchased from M.M.LaFleur before

• The M Dash has proven to be a great retention tool. Customers who engage with The M Dash within 2 weeks of their first purchase are more likely to become returning customers.

Problem

The existing digital magazine felt outdated, inconsistent with the visuals across other channels, and very limited in flexibility and functionality. My teammates on the Creative team had been creating a wide variety of writing and beautiful photography for The M Dash but they had no way to distinguish different articles through different layouts, no way to integrate shopping into the content, and very little flexibility to test and evolve their content strategy over time by trying new formats.

My Role

I worked in close collaboration with one other designer from my team, Emalis Robateu. We both contributed to competitive research, presentations, and the design process. I handled project management and documentation. Once Emalis left for another design role, I completed the QA process, the handoff of the article builder, and the redesign of The M Dash homepage on my own. We also collaborated closely with the agency Studio Simpatico on the development of the tool throughout the research, design, development, and handoff process. (See their article on the development process here.)

Designing for Two Layers of Users

This project was about designing a useful and understandable tool for our teammates who create the content for The M Dash as well as designing a better experience for our readers and customers. At every stage of this project, we were considering both of those users.

Goal 1

Design a modular article builder that can be used to create a wide variety of article types.

The first phase of this project was the design of the article builder. Our conversations with the content team gave us criteria for what this tool should be able to create: listicles, essays, profiles, interviews, advice articles, styling articles, and photo essays. In addition, here are a few of the problems we wanted to help them address:

• Find ways to help the photography stand on its own (especially for styling-focused articles) and not require a lot of copy to make it feel like a full article.

• On the other hand, the same should be true for text-based articles. They should stand on their own with just a single header image.

• Balance the needs of articles meant to sell clothing and push specific pieces with the needs of articles that are brand building, useful, fun, or inspiring.

• Improve the legibility on mobile while also maintaining the type hierarchy.

Below is an example of an article created with the new article builder. See the live version here.

Goal 2

Integrate shopping functionality from our e-commerce website into The M Dash.

Before the redesign, we already knew that our styling-focused articles drove transactions simply through linking the featured items to product pages on the e-comm site. We thought integrating some of the already existing shopping functionality on our e-comm site into The M Dash would make it easier to transition from reading to shopping for customers who were interested. The video below shows one example of that functionality, a “shop this look” module that pops up and allows you to add items to your cart without leaving the page.

Goal 3

Update the outdated visual design.

In addition to the redesign of the article CMS, we also wanted to redesign The M Dash’s homepage and navigation. The original design was feeling outdated and cluttered. In particular, I wanted to bring more balance to the awkwardly cropped and sized images, stronger hierarchy to the typography, and an overall cleaner and more editorial look and feel.

Previous Homepage:

New Homepage:

Note: Implementation of the homepage was delayed due to the COVID 19 pandemic.

The Design Process

The design process had a cyclical quality where we moved between designing example articles, showing them to teammates for critique, sorting out which modules we would need based on these layouts, and defining the type style guide based on our example articles. We iterated on that process a few times until we were satisfied with the look and feel of the articles that could be built from the modules while still feeling like we had enough options and flexibility to be creative with this editorial tool.

Below is a glimpse of what the design process was like in Sketch. Each artboard contains a few different possible configurations of a module. The modules are just pieces that can be added into either one-column or two-column layouts. And because of the modular format, you can switch between the one-column layout and the two-column layout within an article.

As we got closer to finalizing our designs, I created a product specification document to keep track of all of the options available in each module we wanted Studio Simpatico to build. This tracked things like which modules had width options, padding options, and alignment options. It also kept track of what text fields were available in each module and matched those text fields to type styles in our type style guide.

The Results

Here’s a selection of clips from real pieces from The M Dash that shows the variety of different modules that are available for mixing and matching to create an article:

There are also a few different toggles for controlling the interaction between these different modules. For instance, modules placed next to one another in the two-column format can be top-aligned, center-aligned, or bottom-aligned. Similarly, there are two padding options for the space between modules. A checkbox can also make one side “sticky” in order to easily create a split-screen scrolling effect:

Conclusion

Once Simpatico completed the initial development of all of these modules, I tested out the tool by creating seven or eight different variations of articles in the staging environment that they had made available to me. During this period, I catalogued all of the bugs and kept in communication with Simpatico as each one was fixed. At that point, we launched the tool and it became available to use in our Wordpress account! This was very exciting but not quite the end of the journey. The final step was implementing the new tool by educating my team including the other designers, design interns, the photo art director who oversees photography for The M Dash and of course the writers who create the content for The M Dash. I showed them the ropes of the new tool through presentations and a few weeks of hands-on help while we transitioned over. It’s now been in use since the spring of 2020!

For further exploration of this project, here are a few examples of articles that have been published with this CMS tool. Each of these uses different modules and elements to create a unique layout for different types of content:

The Profile:

Mary Cain Refuses to Stay in Her Lane

The Styling Story:

How to Layer T-Shirts Like a Professional Stylist

The Listicle:

6 Tips for Stopping Anxiety in Its Tracks

The Essay:

The Reason 1 in 4 Women Might Quit Her Job

The Interview:

M.M.’s Co-Founders on What Makes Their Relationship Work

The Photo Essay / Lookbook:

The Story Behind the Ready to Rally Collection

Thank you for reading!