Product Development: 2018-2019 Tech Review website redesign

Driven by updated leadership structure and business strategy, along with learnings discovered since the 2015-2016 redesign of technologyreview.com, we saw a need to redesign the website in 2018. Based on our own analytics as well as some research performed by a market research partner, we had identified that we had an addressable audience of roughly 42 million people, and our leadership set some ambitious goals about not only going after them, but also getting them to pay for our content. This evolution of the site was meant to deliver on some of those goals.

Site requirements:

• Improve the mobile experience on site given the fact that about 50% our traffic was coming from mobile (and growing)

• Reinforce all revenue channels, but in particular grow subscriptions and event ticket sales

• Increase time on site; demonstrate value of content and entice readers to pay for more

• Improve site speed and SEO metrics to make for the best – and most relevant – reading experience possible

Our approach:  We again worked with Upstatement to develop the site’s strategy and top level designs. They delivered an approach for the homepage and article pages that was based on conventions found in social media feeds. Once they handed off these designs, work by the internal TR Product Development team commenced to determine how to apply them to the rest of the site, as well as how to implement the update to the front end in build.

Accessibility testing and beta testing were important phases in this site design, and in fact lead us to go back to the drawing board prior to an expected October ‘18 launch because we determined that our approach was so mobile-optimized that the other 50% (or so) of our traffic coming in from desktop could have been optimized better.

Our redesigned site is built for speed, and we chose to build out the designs with a single page app and on React. We now rival industry-leading Quartz on our homepage, and beat them on our article pages.

Challenges to this project

Post-launch: The speed-related boost to our SEO took some time to register, and we stood up automated performance testing to monitor and maintain the higher performance. We also engaged in a user research phase to test elements like card stacks, the nav, and article transitions with our broader audience post-launch.

My role:

• Lead initial input gathering from stakeholders and passed this on to Upstatement in their briefing

• Product owner for Upstatement engagement & handoff to dev team

• Established MVP features for redesigned site informed by stakeholder inputs and technical feasibility

• QA for expected behaviors

• Headed beta testing and user/accessibility reviews

• Lead internal statuses with leadership team

• Ran all-company shares at key points

• Trained editorial staff to use new features

• Created and distributed launch checklist for April 23 launch

• Quality Assurance

Tools used:

• Trello for project management

• Done.done for bug tracking

• Browserstack and devices for testing

• Hotjar for beta testing

• MIT Accessibility office for user testing and accessibility review

• Google Analytics & Parse.ly for site metrics

The team :

• Erik Pelletier: Chief Digital Officer/VP of Product Development

• Emily Waggoner: UX/Design lead

• Jon Akland: UX/UI Designer

• Shaun Calhoun: Lead Engineer

• Molly Frey: Senior Software Engineer

• Zach Green: Senior Software Engineer

• Jason Lewicki: Senior Software Engineer

• Alli Chase: Project Manager