Redesign:
In early 2019 my team and I began redesigning the browsing experience for advice articles on our website, a popular content type for our users: K-12 teachers.
We set out to redesign the page visually, and to rethink the entire user experience for article browsing on our site. The project was a collaboration between our content strategy, design, engineering, and research teams.
Challenge:
How would we redesign a page that displays snippets of existing content from a library of literally thousands of individual articles?
Problem:
Design wise, the existing browse page had quite a few issues. For starters, the page overall was rather text heavy. Additionally, each article snippet contained a multitude of fields, including social share buttons for each article. On top of this, article formatting varied a lot, as some articles dated back over eight years. Here's an example of how the existing page looked:
Research and Action:
Turning to a sampling of users, we uncovered some of the priorities teachers had when using the page to find articles. From there, we set out to simplify the browsing experience to help users find and get what they wanted more swiftly. Here's a design wireframe we used:
Considerations:
One important insight was that users wanted an easier way to browse our articles by topic. Our team responded by re-taxonomizing our entire content library, and designing a system of user-facing, clickable topic buttons to help guide users to the most useful and engaging content. Here's a zoomed-in example of our new topic buttons:
Great! We had a brand new taxonomy and new topic buttons, to boot. All done? Not so fast. To fit this new experience, we needed to create a set of fewer than 15 specific topics that covered our entire content library, each with a brief yet descriptive label. Here's the list we landed on:
Content Strategy:
From a content strategy perspective, this also meant taking a serious look at our entire inventory of article content. We ended up culling a significant percentage of our older and under-performing articles. From there, we re-tagged all of the remaining 500+ articles using the new taxonomy.
We also used insights from this work to help inform an updated set of guidelines for all new article content going forward. In this sense, our overall design work wasn't just useful in redesigning this webpage, but it also helped us recognize opportunities to write and publish better, more user-centered articles moving forward.
