The American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC) is one of the world’s leading authorities on benchmarking, best practices, and performance improvement. Organizations worldwide rely on their research to make better decisions. APQC sought to enhance their content publishing system with streamlined workflows and an updated content experience, as their Research Services team was ready to move beyond a PDF-based workflow. Members increasingly expected to access research on any device, at any time, without limitation.
APQC partnered with Tag1 to conduct comprehensive UX research and discovery. Tag1’s Experience Design & Strategy team collaborated closely with APQC stakeholders across Research Services, Marketing, and Technology, leading detailed interviews, reviewing over 40 internal documents, and analyzing complex user workflows. This discovery process identified specific friction points in content creation and review cycles, uncovered opportunities for workflow automation, and built essential cross-departmental alignment around a unified vision for transformation.
Together, the teams reimagined the content template to improve scannability, interactivity, and accessibility across devices and aligned it with APQC’s evolved brand guidelines.
The way we deliver our research should reflect the quality of the research itself. For us, that meant creating an experience that’s easier to read and navigate across devices, while giving our teams better tools to bring that content to our members.
Amanda Schalyo - Executive Director, Marketing and Digital Experience - APQC
In parallel, Tag1 engineered a unified editorial workflow that streamlined reviews and approvals, eliminated manual handoffs, and enabled the team to publish responsive, accessible HTML content. The result: a faster, smoother publishing process, stronger collaboration across teams, and a member experience that worked as well on a phone as it did on a desktop. This transformation advances APQC’s mission of helping organizations improve performance through shared knowledge and proven best practices.
Challenges & Solutions
APQC recognized their members needed a better digital experience. Through member feedback and internal analysis, the organization identified a growing gap between how research was being delivered (static PDFs) and how their global membership expected to consume content (responsive, accessible, mobile-first). This recognition drove APQC’s commitment to transformation.
APQC’s Research Services team relied on a PDF-centric publishing workflow that slowed reviews, limited digital reuse, and constrained how users consumed research. Content was authored in external tools like Microsoft Word, passed through email chains for feedback, then converted into static PDFs.
Challenges Identified
Through a comprehensive Strategy & Discovery phase, Tag1 worked closely with APQC to understand how content creation needed to be optimized:
Manual Workflow
Content drafting, reviews, and approvals all happened outside the content management system through email chains, creating multiple handoffs.
PDF-Centric Output
The legacy Drupal system produced static PDFs, forcing users to view the content only in that format.
Members using phones or tablets had difficulty accessing the content, which wasn’t optimized for mobile viewing.
Time-Intensive Formatting
Creating tables, charts, and graphs was entirely manual, requiring significant time and effort with every piece of content produced.
User Experience Improvements
The existing content template did not reflect APQC’s latest brand guidelines or updated UX best practices.
The experience lacked engaging elements like embedded video that today’s users expect.
The design of the content template needed to align with APQC’s evolved brand and accessibility requirements.
The content template was not responsive or accessible across devices.
Limited Content Authoring Experience Within Drupal
The legacy content authoring interface was not truly WYSIWYG, making it hard for writers and editors to see exactly how content would appear and format complex elements.
These challenges were validated through:
Stakeholder interviews across the Research Services, Marketing, and related teams
Review of over 40 internal documents examining current workflows and pain points
Analysis of user flow diagrams to clarify roles, permissions, and responsibilities
Requirements documentation ensuring all functional and technical needs were captured
This discovery work grounded the redesign in real user behavior and created essential cross-department alignment and buy-in.
APQC + Tag1’s Solution
APQC and Tag1 approached the engagement as both a workflow transformation and a content experience redesign, addressing people, process, and platform together rather than in isolation. Driven by APQC’s commitment to improving user experience, Tag1 redesigned APQC’s publishing process end-to-end, replacing legacy friction with a unified, Drupal-based editorial workflow built for speed, flexibility, and brand consistency.
A Unified, Modern Editorial Workflow
The project transformed the PDF, multi-tool process into an all-in-one authoring and publishing system with built-in drafting, editing, and approvals with seamless versioning, workflow visibility, and role-aligned permissions, reducing manual touchpoints.
Accelerated Review & Approval Cycles
The new workflow consolidated feedback inside Drupal, replacing email chains with a centralized, efficient system. While APQC’s team had adapted to their previous process, the unified workflow revealed new possibilities, giving authors, editors, and reviewers complete visibility into content status and eliminating manual handoffs.
Enhanced Formatting & Content Creation Tools
The collaboration modernized APQC’s content creation capabilities by enabling on-brand tables, charts, graphs, images, and video. An automatic table of contents improved navigation across longer documents and all device types.
Formatting tasks that once took hours now take minutes because the research team was empowered with the right technology tools.
A Complete Redesign of the Content Template
Tag1’s Experience Design & Strategy team collaborated closely with APQC’s Marketing team to deliver a modern, branded, and accessible template aligned with the organization’s evolved brand guide. APQC’s vision for accessible, mobile-first research delivery guided every design decision.
The redesigned template is cleaner, on-brand, more engaging, scannable, and accessible across devices.
Responsive, User-Friendly Content Delivery
By shifting away from PDF dependency, APQC now delivers content that adapts seamlessly to laptops, desktops, tablets, and mobile devices, meeting user expectations for digital reading experiences.
Shifting to HTML-based content also improved search engine visibility, making APQC’s research easier to find through organic search. This shift reflects APQC’s strategic commitment to meeting members where they are, on any device.
A Purpose-Built Authoring Experience Inside Drupal
To simplify content creation, Tag1 developed a custom WYSIWYG editing interface that uses the site’s front-end theme. This eliminated the disconnect between the edit screen and the published page, reduced complexity, and ensured writers saw exactly how their content would appear to users.
Working with APQC’s team to understand their daily workflow, Tag1 extended CKEditor with custom plugins for auto-numbered figures, multi-level tables of contents, styled block quotes, and improved Word import, directly inside Drupal.
Workflow Prototyping to Drive Alignment
To ensure the new multi-step editorial workflow behaved exactly as APQC intended, Tag1 used a previously developed custom workflow prototyping tool that visually mapped each step. This accelerated decision-making and ensured clarity across teams. APQC’s deep involvement in testing and refining the workflow ensured the final system matched real-world editorial practices.
Strategic Outcomes & Benefits
The work Tag1 and APQC did together delivered results that touched every part of the operation: internal workflows, team adoption, member experience, and the long-term health of the platform.
Operational Improvements
The Research Services team could move content from draft to publication without the delays that email-based reviews and manual formatting used to create. With repetitive formatting tasks removed, team members could put their time and attention toward content quality instead. Workflows are now structured around clear roles and permissions, which strengthened collaboration between Research Services and Marketing and brought stronger brand consistency to every piece of content published.
User Adoption & Support
APQC and Tag1 supported the transition to the new system with detailed training documentation and video walkthroughs so team members could get up to speed quickly and work with confidence. User acceptance testing was completed under real-world conditions to make sure the system held up both technically and in day-to-day use. The result was a team that felt prepared and confident from day one, with no significant disruption to publishing operations during the transition.
Member Experience Impact
APQC’s research is now fully accessible on any device, whether a member is on a desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone. Content is easier to read, easier to scan, and more engaging than the static PDFs it replaced. This directly supports APQC’s mission of helping organizations improve performance through shared knowledge and proven best practices.
Platform & Technical Alignment
Building on Drupal as the foundation gives APQC a stable, flexible platform that can support future content initiatives without starting from scratch. The combination of experience design and deep Drupal expertise meant that what was learned during discovery translated directly into a solution that works in the real world and can grow with the organization over time.
Why Tag1 for APQC
APQC recognized that transforming their publishing system required both deep technical expertise and a partner who would truly understand their mission. APQC needed a partner who could translate a complex, outdated publishing process into a modern, efficient, and reliable editorial system. They chose Tag1 for their ability to connect strategic insight, experience design, and deep Drupal architecture into a single, cohesive solution. This engagement required balancing speed, governance, accessibility, and long-term maintainability, areas where Tag1 has repeatedly delivered for mission-critical platforms.
Key strengths demonstrated in this engagement include:
Strategy-Driven Experience Design
Tag1 started by understanding—reviewing real workflows, identifying opportunities to improve the process, and aligning stakeholders. Tag1 worked alongside the APQC team, whose deep subject matter expertise and understanding of its users' needs guided every decision, ensuring the solution reflected how they actually work and supported their commitment to delivering world-class research.
Unmatched Drupal Expertise
APQC was already invested in Drupal. Tag1’s role was to make the platform do more, introducing modern editorial tools, complex workflow logic, and a better authoring experience without compromising stability or maintainability. APQC’s team played an essential role in defining workflow requirements, ensuring the system supported their rigorous review and approval processes.
A Unified Approach to Cross-Team Alignment
With multiple contributors, reviewers, and publication roles, APQC needed clarity and structure. Tag1 excels at coordinating across teams and delivering systems that support collaboration.
A Trusted Partner for High-Stakes Change
APQC’s research is core to its mission. They needed confidence that the shift away from PDFs and manual workflows would be successful. Tag1 is known for bringing speed, rigor, and predictability to initiatives where outcomes truly matter.
Designing Complex Editorial Workflows
Tag1’s deep expertise in Drupal’s workflow engine, form modes, and CKEditor customization enabled APQC to implement a structured, role-driven publishing process that matches the complexity of real editorial operations, without sacrificing usability.
What made the collaboration with Tag1 valuable was the time they took to understand how our teams work and what our members need. We brought a clear vision for the experience, and together we worked through the details of making that vision practical for the people creating and publishing our research.
Amanda Schalyo - Executive Director, Marketing and Digital Experience - APQC
For APQC, Tag1’s strategy-first approach identified the need for a unified editorial workflow, and Tag1’s Drupal expertise delivered a solution built for flexibility and long-term use.
APQC’s investment went beyond improving internal workflows. It fundamentally enhanced how members engage with their research content. APQC’s leadership and clear vision for member-first digital experiences drove every decision throughout the project. The collaboration exemplified true partnership, with Tag1’s team working as an extension of APQC’s Technology, Research Services, and Marketing teams. This collaborative approach ensured solutions were shaped by deep understanding of APQC’s mission, workflows, and member needs.
For Technical Readers
The Technology Behind the Transformation
The technical architecture was shaped by several factors: writers and editors were most familiar with Microsoft Word, the team needed to import existing content seamlessly, and inline comments and track changes were required to maintain collaborative editing. These factors strongly favored CKEditor with a premium subscription combined with a customized Drupal workflow configuration. The premium subscription provided:
Inline comments
Track changes / suggestions
Enhanced Word import
Challenges with CKEditor
Despite these advantages, several challenges remained:
WYSIWYG Limitations: Editing a CKEditor-enabled text field in Drupal is not fully WYSIWYG, as the front-end theme often renders the content differently from the edit form’s preview.
Complex Edit Forms: The default edit form was overwhelmingly complex due to many metadata fields used for access control, reporting, and categorization.
Feature Gaps in Vanilla CKEditor: Some feature requirements could not be met by “vanilla” CKEditor, including:
Auto-incrementing figure numbering to support citations and references
Optional lightbox display for images
Block quotes with custom styling and attributions
Optional multi-level table of contents
Workflow Complexity
Drupal’s workflow configuration system is robust and flexible, enabling the implementation of almost any workflow. Key considerations included the following.
Approval order for multiple reviewers
Role-based restrictions for who can approve first
Handling changes requested during multi-step reviews
Managing edge cases that arise as workflows become more complex
Meeting these requirements required customizations beyond default Drupal and CKEditor capabilities.
Custom Solutions
Tag1 implemented the following.
A combination of contributed and custom Drupal modules.
Non-default form modes rendered using the front-end theme to address WYSIWYG issues and restrict access to sensitive data.
Most Drupal developers are familiar with view modes, but custom form modes are typically underutilized. These are integrated with the routing system to allow Drupal developers to create enhanced editing experiences. These work especially well when different users need to edit the same underlying entity.
Given the complexity of the editorial workflow, additional validation was required before finalizing implementation. Tag1 used a custom-built workflow prototyping tool to work through the details with stakeholders before moving into development.
A Custom-Built Workflow Prototyping Tool
Complex editorial workflows are hard to reason about and validate, especially when multiple roles, permissions, and review paths are involved. Small ambiguities can cause misalignment during implementation.
To reduce risk and accelerate alignment, Tag1 used an internally developed AI-assisted workflow prototyping tool. This enabled both teams to visualize and test complex editorial workflows interactively before development began, rather than relying on static diagrams or lengthy approval cycles that could delay implementation.
The resulting clarity informed the final Drupal workflow configuration, ensuring it behaved as expected and aligned with APQC’s real-world editorial practices. While the prototyping tools were internal, the insights improved communication, reduced rework, and supported faster decision-making.
