The challenge
Bauer Media Group is one of Europe's largest publishing houses — 500+ media products across 10+ countries, reaching tens of millions of readers a month. Each brand had grown its own tooling, so shipping and maintaining content was slow and inconsistent across the portfolio.
TONI is Bauer's content-and-commerce CMS with an embedded AI assistant — one place for editorial teams to produce, orchestrate and distribute content across every brand and channel, without flattening what makes each brand distinct.
My contribution
- —UX strategy & experience vision for the platform
- —Design-system architecture & governance
- —Stakeholder alignment across brands & leadership
- —Continuous user research with editorial teams
- —Day-to-day collaboration with product & engineering
One platform had to serve dozens of brands without flattening what makes each one distinct
Editors needed to publish fast, but each brand reinventing components broke consistency and slowed maintenance.
Cosmopolitan, InTouch and heat can't look the same. The system had to flex to strong, separate identities.
Content, media and layout lived in different tools. Editors wanted one calm place to do their day's work.
AI had to speed up real editorial tasks — not add novelty that teams would quietly stop using.
A design system as a product, shaped by the people who use it every day
Rather than a static UI kit, we treated the system as a living product with owners, versioning and a governance model — so brand teams could move fast on top of it without drifting apart. Below are the four moves that made that work.
Fast development and brand rollouts with a flexible design system
We built a comprehensive, tokenised design system and component library as the shared foundation for every brand front-end. Tokens carried brand theming; components carried behaviour. That split is what let one team ship many brands.
10+ major brands relaunched in 18 months, and new brand front-ends went from weeks to days to stand up.
Component overrides for distinct brand experiences
Shared components accept brand-level overrides, so a card or hero can look and behave differently for Cosmopolitan than for heat while inheriting the same accessible, tested base. Brand teams customise the surface; the platform keeps the guarantees.
Brands with lower visibility were designed less distinctly to save effort on building dedicated overrides. That focus is what let us keep the ambitious deadlines.
Modular CMS components for content that moves
Editors compose pages from modular blocks — galleries, product cards, polls, rich text, embeds — that reflow responsibly across web, app and newsletter. Content is authored once and adapts to each channel instead of being rebuilt.
Omni-channel publishing from a single source, with far less duplicate work per story.
Quick “Tip/Tap” editing, one media library, and AI that helps
Editors edit content in place with lightweight “Tip/Tap” controls and pull from one centralised media asset library. The embedded AI assistant, TONI, drafts headlines, summaries and alt text and suggests components — always as an editable suggestion the editor stays in control of.
Continuous usability testing and in-product feedback with real editorial teams drove the roadmap. Also we invited editors to a weekly feedback and open door session to give us product feedback. We shipped, watched where people hesitated, and cut friction release over release.
Proven with readers and editors, sharpened release over release
On the reader-facing front-ends we ran revolving A/B tests to lift the conversion of our commerce content. On the editor side we gathered feedback continuously — through regular user surveys and open-door sessions where editors could talk us through their pains and gains — and fed what we learned straight back into the roadmap.
What came out of it
- →10+ magazine brands relaunched on one shared platform, each keeping its own identity
- →A single component library with per-brand overrides, so new front-ends stand up in days
- →One editorial flow — author, enrich with AI, and publish omni-channel from one place
