Grid News Homepage Redesign
1. Overview
About Grid
Grid News was a Washington, D.C. digital media company that focused on in-depth reporting, encouraging collaboration in the newsroom to give readers the full picture to every news event. Its target audience were readers who were already familiar with the news and looking for more context and a deeper dive.
The slogan (which I helped pen) was “Other news outlets tell you what happened. Grid tells you why.”
The Challenge
The original Grid homepage was designed prior to the editorial vision being fully developed. It was designed to be simple and flexible. But as the vision developed and evolved, the simplicity of the design became limiting. This made it harder to find content and also did not fully express the editorial strategy of the Grid brand.
My Role
- Managed the design team
- Ran brainstorming sessions with the editorial, revenue, and executive teams
- Ran user interviews
- Directed the design direction, stepping in to do design work as well
- Planned sprints along with the Product Manager and Head of Technology
- Managed the design to dev handoff
2. User Research & Discovery
The first step was to conduct user research to gain insights into the pain points and expectations of Grid’s target audience. This involved a combination of surveys, interviews, and usability testing with current users. We also did a deep dive into our competitors and our own user data. This data provided essential insights into our users and where the current design was falling short.
Surveys
We ran two surveys, one through our newsletter audience and one aimed at our most highly engaged users.
Interviews
We conducted one on one interviews through zoom as well as by phone with emailed questions. It was the users choice to decide their preference.
Competitor Analysis
We ran an in-depth analysis of other news website homepages. We compared trends, features and patterns.
Data
Worked with our audience development team in creating a data report on our current homepage users.
Goals
After analyzing our user research and data and meeting with key stakeholders, we set the following three goals.
Add the ability to curate content
The current homepage was a list of articles in reverse chronological order. What we found was our users who actively visited our homepage were looking to engage in specific topics and looking for a more guided experience.
Better showcase Grid’s unique interconnected journalism style
This was a unique feature of Grid that our users really enjoyed, but we found through our user testing that it was not clearly represented through the design.
Better identify different content types.
There were multiple content types on the homepage including video, audio and written articles. But there was not enough differentiation and identification to our users.
3. Wireframing
Using the defined objectives as a guide, the product designer and I created wireframes to explore different layout options and content placements.
We wanted to achieve our three goals while creating a flexible design that could easily evolve over time. We spent a lot of time planning our grid and components, setting up a module based design.
4. Visual Design
5. Final Conclusions & Reflections
A week before the design was set to go live, Grid News was acquired by another news organization, The Messenger. Even though the design did not go live, we created a strong competitive design that achieved all 3 of our goals.
