Product Development: 2015-2016 website redesign and relaunch

Although MIT Technolgy Review has its roots in the print publication world, recent years have seen a shift in the way people consume content, necessitating a “Digital First” approach. This means: content released on an ongoing basis (rather than batch releases of articles created for a bi-monthly magazine) in a way that is intuitive to find and easy to read online. The launch of the new technologyreview.com heralds in an era of user focused and responsive online experiences for this 116 year old media company, effectively proving that you can indeed teach an old magazine a new trick or two.

Site requirements:

• Design a delightful reading experience: The website must look great across all devices

• Make it effortless to discover: Navigation should be topic-based, and searching should be easy

• Provide a more flexible design architecture: The old site was template based. Time to break out of that.

• Create a habit for return visitors: Incentivize daily visits by providing fresh content on a rolling basis.

• Metering content to increase paid subscriptions: Limited free online articles to drive subscribing for more access

Our approach:  Armed with an initial research project (see below), analysis of Google Analytics, and stakeholder interviews to suss out internal team members’ wants and needs, we briefed in a local agency called Upstatement as our design partner. Working with them as an extension of our team, we were able to maximize our available budget to create a design strategy, concept and prototypes.

The Technology Review development team picked up where Upstatement left off by building out a custom CMS which allowed for more modularity in creating articles, alleviating the need for the (non-responsive) templates of the past.

Post-launch: The website relaunch was just a single step on the journey towards MIT Technology Review becoming truly “Digital First”. Since launching in February, we’ve continued to make adjustments to the CMS to make it more usable for the editorial staff and to account for desired feature and functionality updates. We are currently undertaking a major project to boost ad viewability, which will include removing the continuous scrolling behavior, increasing the number of ads on the page and forcing advertising partners to adhere to specs around ad file sizes.

My role:

• Lead research project to gain insight into current technology.com users

• Briefed Upstatement team

• Maintained Upstatement relationship and ran daily meetings

• Project and resource planning

• Vendor collaboration with 3rd party testing company

• Project management

• Quality Assurance

The team:

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

• Emily Waggoner: UX/Design lead

• Shaun Calhoun: Lead Engineer

• Molly Frey: Senior Software Engineer

• Jason Lewicki: Senior Software Engineer

• Kevin Leary: Principal Front End Engineer

• DJ Hartman: Software Engineer