Breathing new life into the SIDEARM CMS that powers the digital presence of over 1,600+ college athletics partners.
Research Journey Mapping Design System Wireframing Prototyping UI Design
The SIDEARM Content Management System powers the entirety of the SIDEARM product ecosystem—from official athletics websites and mobile apps, rosters and stats and beyond. The CMS is immensely feature packed and has helped the company establish itself as the industry leader, however it is extremely outdated from a user experience perspective.
Built over the last twenty years, the current CMS is a product of the work of many different developers building features to fulfill the vastly different needs of hundreds of partner schools without a unifying system or involvement by designers. This has led to an experience that while feature-robust, contains many redundancies, confusing flows, deprecated features, and is visually dated. In 2024, the cross-functional Product Team at SIDEARM began the Herculean task of rebuilding the CMS from the ground up.
An example of the CMS’ outdated legacy UI
An example of a small section’s journey map
With the density of functionality, some of these journey maps got quite long
In order to create a new vision of the Content Management System, the first requirement was to fully understand the entirety of the current CMS. To achieve this, I lead the team as we painstakingly crafted user journeys for every task flow in the CMS—this allowed us to grasp the complexities of the project as well as core areas of improvement. This, combined with business goals and partner feedback, led to the creation of requirements for each section of the CMS.
Prepped with our system maps, business requirements and product definitions built by our cross-functional team, our next step was to build a consistent design system to support the functional needs of the CMS—something that had never been done for the legacy system. To this end I co-led the creation of the CMS System, a centrally-managed collection of styles, variables, modules, style guides and design principles made to be scalable, accessible, and easy for other designers to utilize.
