Context
Facilitators of poetic medicine bring curated material and workshop prompts to prisons, hospitals, and high-stress environments. Selecting works that will connect with the audience is critical and time-consuming.
Research
I interviewed several facilitators about how they organized for workshops and identified the following feature set that would prove valuable:
A curated selection of proven works
Example writing prompts to draw from
A way to save favorite pieces that are used frequently
Solution
I built a database that could be curated by senior facilitators for more junior members to draw from. The database features several key components:
Rich taxonomy based filtering by themes, workshops, and intended audience
Bookmarking functionality
A quick preview, allowing an easy way to skim through search results without forward/back navigation
Native PDF generation to easily print handouts directly from the site
Easy content management (more on this below…)
Observation of pain points
As part of this project, I observed one of the senior facilitators’ process for building out a workshop to understand the pain points along the way.
They had collected hundreds (maybe thousands) of curated poems and organized PDFs, and Word documents in folders. For repeat workshops, this worked well and the process was fairly smooth.
For new workshops, however, this proved difficult to navigate as some folders focused on themes, while others were workshop specific. Certain poems might exist in many different folders, while others would only exist in the context of a workshop folder, and be missing from where one might expect within themes.
Going through poems was also tedious, as it involved opening each to view the poem content. Often document formatting varied between poems requiring some amount of editing before being ready to print.
Some writing prompts were included in edited versions of poem documents, others were by themselves within associated workshop folders. Again, this led to duplication/omission issues.
Building a solution
The most immediate need that became clear was a centralized source of truth for organization via taxonomies.
Through interviewing and observation, the three taxonomies that stood out were theme, workshop, and audience.
I also included a live update search field for quickly finding poems if a piece of the title or author name is known.
Filters all are defaulted to “AND” logic, since this seemed most useful for narrowing down results, but I would like to add the ability to choose between AND/OR logic in a future update.
Another latent need that stood out was the ability to skim a lot of poems quickly. This led me to add the “quick preview” functionality that brings up the poem contents in a quickly dismissible modal, so that the user will not lose their place in the list when viewing a poem.
Optimizing the experience for content managers
One of the requirements for this project was to make sure the curated poems and filters could be easily managed.
I chose to store the data on a WordPress backend for the ubiquity of the platform. I significantly streamlined the admin, however, to make the experience more straightforward.
Results
The platform is about to be released to early facilitators in beta form to test and make additional feature requests.
I’m excited to see how this helps lighten the administrative load and let practitioners focus on the work.