The new printing press

Inkling

Role
Product Designer

Inkling makes it easy for large organizations and publishers to build beautiful responsive, always up-to-date content.

Here's a preview of the core Inkling Habitat platform.

During my time at Inkling, I focused primarily on tooling for our enterprise customers to help them scale up adoption of Inkling's authoring and publishing systems. I lead design for Inkling's "Modules" feature as well as our new Saas code editor that enabled customers to manage interactive components across a wide library of titles with ease. Additionally, I designed our presence indication, merge-conflict management, and collaboration workflows inside the platform.

To support our enterprise end-users, I designed new global search experiences that worked across all mobile and web platforms.

Module management

Inkling's authoring environment, Habitat, helps organizations and authors build interactive, engaging content. Built on a drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG editor, teams can easily pull in repeating patterns that help learners better grasp the content at hand. From interactive diagrams, 3D modules, to videos and even end-of-chapter quizzes that linked to LMS systems.

Inkling's core authoring envrioment, Habitat, is based on dragging and dropping "Patterns" to build content.

Working closely with our research team, I designed a "package management system" that allows teams to build, test, deploy, and iterate on these interactive patterns. Developers were provided with powerful bulk action tooling to manage installations of these so called "Modules" across their entire organization. They could track usage, manage changes with semantic version control, and ensure their authoring teams always have access to the best interactive elements for the content they were building.

Module Management

Enabling scalable styling

As teams published more content with Inkling Habitat, it was important that updating styling, from brand colors to typography, could be done easily.

I designed a Sass code editor that made it easy to manage styles at scale. Using pre-compiling and version control, editing styles across a publication is both fast and ready for collaboration.

Sass code editing includes a new compling tool. Using a new asynchronous pre-compling system, we can help reduce the time developers need to spend making small changes in the title's styling.

When Sass files fails to compile the debug console expands to help troubleshoot issues.

.scss files are compiled down to .css files, which are reviewable but locked

Real Time Collaboration

To enable collaboration between multiple authors, we built presence indication into the core authoring environment. This alerted users on nearby and matching pages to their team members behavior. As our platform did not support live collaboration, we wanted to provide guidance to end users on changes they and others were making on the page. These notifications were paired with robust version control and change management tooling to ensure content authors could move quickly without stepping on each other's toes.

Here's a video demo of the presence indication, page activity, and save+merge system.

Global search

As Inkling pivoted more into retail and frontline employee education tools, I designed a new global search experience so that workers can find anything they need, across all permissioned content in a snap. This search experience bridged both local and cloud content. It's now available using Inkling Axis on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and responsive web platforms.

Search works across individual titles and helps provide just-in-time access to important resources.

Search experience on iOS