Building Editions at The Times

Internal tools never get enough attention.

Building them can be a thankless, unseen task that’s rarely prioritised, as it is not immediately obvious how to tie investment in them back to the bottom line. It can be too easy to jump on the customer-facing speedboat and jet away from them, leaving a wake of stopgaps that can often leave you with tightly coupled intricate workarounds that are enormously difficult to pick apart.

This was the case at The Times for the last four years. While we spent a long time discussing and designing how editions might work on our readers’ screens, we didn’t place any focus on how to make building these experiences manageable for our editors. We quickly shoehorned the process into our generic digital CMS, making it difficult to maintain or build upon, and creating a process for our editors that took much longer than it should have done.

Edition Builder was our solution to this problem, and has been two years in the making. At its heart, it is a simple drag and drop interface that allows you to place and publish stories in our edition. Beneath the surface is a huge amount of user research and UX refinement and, crucially, the foundations for future newsroom tools.

Late last year The Times went live, and this week The Sunday Times joined them, and now all editions from The Times and The…