Executive Summary
After the wider team had spent months transferring the old app onto a new infrastructure, which included the full use of a new design system, we were finally able to implement some much-desired stylistic and information architecture experiments to refresh what was at the time a limited, ad-driven content app that had started showing its age.
Given that this was intended primarily as a white-labeled content app platform, our partners' approval and continued support was critical to the business. In addition, I had conducted some deep user research work the year previous -- the results of this research had yielded some fruit, but many of the content and UI format improvement hypotheses that came out of it had had to wait on architectural work, which was now coming to a conclusion.
With the approval of my Chief Product Officer, I then set my team the challenge of re-imagining our app's content experience at both the UI and the deeper UX level, working closely with the app's product managers, as well as its engineering leads, who were able to help us keep our ideation right on the edge of what was newly possible.
Navigation & IA Shifts
More details to come...
Feature Upgrades
More details to come...
Aesthetic Upgrades
More details to come...
Bringing it all together
These were the high-fidelity interaction concepts that came out of the process of marrying our user research outputs, and our client/partners' expectations:
"For You"
The newest concept: "For You" feed that surfaces light personalization options while hinting at deeper power for user-directed customization. One of the biggest challenges to implement this feature up until this time was the sheer time and effort our Publishing team put into deepening our content partner relationships, in order to have a deeper book of content that would be able to yield a meaningful number of results when filtered.
The new Search UX
One of the most-requested, but most-difficult-to-implement features for a content aggregator, Search was finally enabled by new implementation on the code architecture side, so we designed a dedicated home for it under the new "Discover" tab
The new Gallery UX
One of the more popular content types, and one of the few that the company was able to produce entirely in-house while maintaining healthy margins, were ad-powered photo galleries. We knew that we would want to feature them prominently in the redesign, with an updated look.
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