Hi. I’m Jax.
Senior Product Designer · Enterprise UX · Headless CMS · Brand & Creative Strategy · Bilingual EN/ES
Senior Product Designer · Enterprise UX · Headless CMS · Brand & Creative Strategy · Bilingual EN/ES
The Short Version
After the agency offloaded, two people held the institutional knowledge of Ricoh's entire Contentful content model. The tech lead on the development side. Me on the content experience side. Together we took an inherited component library that was approaching its limit and made it leaner, smarter, and significantly easier for content editors to use.
My Role
Content experience lead on all component decisions. Gathered friction points directly from content editors, made recommendations on how to enhance or optimize components, and worked alongside the tech lead to execute. Used Miro and Airtable to document decisions, map component architecture, and track priorities.
What We Inherited
A content model built with the agency during the Sitecore to Contentful replatform. Solid foundation but with redundancies, rigidity, and a component library at 145 out of a 150 component limit. Content editors were spending significant time making decisions that the system should have been making for them.
What We Did
Component Consolidation Reduced the component library by 25 to 30 components as a team, with direct involvement in approximately 20 of those decisions. Five to seven content card variants were consolidated into 2 to 3 reusable cards, cutting redundancy and making the cards usable across multiple areas of the site instead of being locked to a single component.
Focus Section Remodel A tabbed component where tab titles and content titles were rigidly linked. The tab had a character limit but the content title needed to be longer, so editors avoided the component entirely. We broke that link, rethought the parent component structure, and opened up the flexibility of how content was presented. One of the newly consolidated cards replaced two previous card types here.
Homepage Banner Remodel Editors previously had to build three separate banner item components to create a single homepage carousel. We redesigned it so the parent component holds all branding attributes and references the page being promoted directly, pulling in the information already entered when the page was created. Editors now build one component instead of three. The carousel became a full-width edge-to-edge hero banner with sub-items surfaced automatically.
Table of Contents Navigation Editors were manually creating anchors and linking to page sections one by one. I brought the problem to our tech lead and asked for a better way. He built a widget that references the components editors add to a page and editors simply select which ones appear in the Table of Contents. I added a Quick Links section within the component so editors could surface a contact form, a brochure download, or a page link without leaving the content model. The Table of Contents launched first on the Resources page as a live test before rolling out to the Product Detail Page.
Background Color Normalization Components across the site had inconsistent and disjointed background color options. We audited every component, cleaned up the available options, and normalized the list across the site, reducing editor confusion and improving visual consistency.
Resource Page Templates Created dedicated page templates that built in cross-promotion, SEO, meta tagging, and widgets automatically. Editors no longer had to determine the right path for building a page. The template made those decisions for them.
The Impact
Content editors reported a 50 % reduction in the time it took to build and publish pages, based on direct feedback from the team.
The component library went from 145 out of 150 components down to a manageable range, reducing system risk and improving maintainability across the platform.
What's Next
Working with a newly hired Meta Specialist to connect cross-promotion, SEO, and metadata strategy into a unified approach. The planned next phase includes a right-hand rail cross-promotion section within the Table of Contents component, designed for industry-specific personalization. Content editors would fill in data for specific industries through a tabbed experience, and combined with meta tagging that data would drive personalized surfaces of solutions, services, resources, and products to the right user at the right time.
It's the piece that connects the content model to actual business outcomes. Not just cleaner pages but smarter ones.
