Lead designer for the initial launch of The 7 (a daily news briefing) and co-designer for 2020 United States election experiences. I also led design and research for a suite of consumer personalization and enterprise CMS experiences.
The Washington Post wanted to launch a daily briefing for a younger demographic. Dubbed "The 7" for seven summarized news stories from 7am — 10am every day.
Led end-to-end product design, research, and handoff. Led visual design for marketing campaign and American Express sponsorship.
Cross-functional partnership between Design, Product, Graphic Design, Engineering, Newsroom, Marketing, and Advertising.
April — September 2021
Led several rounds of unmoderated qualitative user research with a diverse set of participants across a younger demographic.
Goals included 1) establish a foundational understanding of news needs for "getting caught up quick", 2) understand behavior for audio preferences, and 3) further define general news behaviors for younger demographics.
• Keep it simple — short, sweet, and to the point. Avoid redundant information and use everyday language.
• Emphasize legibility — Use bolding to highlight key information and promote scannability. Distinguish numbers from text to improve flow of the page. Highlight visuals to increase appeal.
• Be convienent — Showcase potential for routine-building. Use CTAs to call attention to other avenues of staying caught up, such as newsletters and in-app experiences. Keep readers within The Washington Post ecosystem.
Strong increase in newsletter signups and subscriber conversion, especially on Apple News. Strong engagement within The 7 app experiences, suggesting The 7 could be a useful tool for subscriber retention.
Next steps included fast-follows for visual refinements, further sponsorship integrations, and further scaling across Washington Post platforms.
2020 brought many unknowns. Our readers had trouble telling fact from fiction. Covid-19, social unrest, and a rise in misinformation made November unpredictable. Our job was to paint a clear, concise, and straightforward picture of what was happening.
Co-led end-to-end research and discovery. Led design for election realtime components and reader acquistion. Co-designer for homepage layouts and brand-new landing page.
Two designers (including myself), design manager, cross-functional partnerships with Product, Engineering, Graphic Design, Data Science, Newsroom, and Advertising.
February 2020 — January 2021
Methodology included task flows and analysis, card sorting, tree testing, and qualitive interviews. I then tweaked our existing reader personas to be election-information focused.
We found that election information was spread far too thin across our existing experiences, and readers had to jump between several pages as a result. We also learned much more about how COVID-19 complicated information-seeking journeys, especially as it came to mail-in voting and delayed results.
• Proactive user education — Communicate the variables exclusive to this election, prominently and clearly. Point to where things have changed from years past. Showcase predicted delays and potential mishaps ahead of time.
• Realtime updates — Always display the latest updates and communicate that the page is live. Promote reader acquistion experiences in moments of standby.
• Consolidate where possible — Group similar information together. Funnel users to a single destination, rather than fragment users across multiple destinations. Allow users to dive deeper when appropiate.
• Realtime components — Increased State Page views by 31%, compared to 2018. Increased ecosystem recirculation from state pages by 45%, compared to 2018. In a post-election survey, 68% of respondents “completely understood” the status of election results. Another 30% “somewhat understood” the status.
• Election landing page — Surpassed goal of non-subscriber page views by nearly 800%. Surpassed goal of overall page views by 513%. Surpassed goal of recirculation within the our ecosystem by nearly 900%.
(1/2) Election landing page —
We needed a dedicated space for election coverage in case another event took precedence on the homepage (e.g. candidate health, natural distater, violence at polls)
(2/2) Election landing page —
We needed a dedicated space for election coverage in case another event took precedence on the homepage (e.g. candidate health, natural distater, violence at polls)