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Overview
Fall 2024
Columbia Daily Spectator is an independent student newspaper organization that serves important information to Columbia University and the Morningside Community. I joined Spectator's Product team as a Product Designer, which followed by 10 weeks of training sessions and a Capstone project. While learning helpful information about product development, market analysis, and KPIs, I reported the progress of my project to the Head of Product. My Capstone dealt with redesigning of the CDS' Special Editions page, which hosts multiple articles about noteworthy themes in the recent times.
Role
Duration
Skills
Tools
Scope
The main focus of my project was to revamp the landing page of the Special Editions, because it really looked like my final project in Intro to Front-End Web Development class. It had a very clumsy hero section with a curly braces from Microsoft PowerPoint and each theme had a very awkward hover effect. The theme boxes were largely displayed, making the page look like an unprofessional fan page that archives some articles.
The problem of the Special Editions' lack of attention and thus not following the greater Spectator's design guidelines was that only a very few portion of the people who use the Spectator knows about the Special Editions and since the Special Editions team contacts with designated designer/engineer only, the speed of Special Editions' change is extremely slow. As a result, Special Editions articles seldom reach many readers and individuals don't spend much time browsing through the Special Editions.
With this context in mind, we arrived at the main question:
How might we funnel more to & retain more within Special Editions?
Stemming from the main question, our priorities were:
More conversion to Special Editions
Special Editions must have a better call-to-action from the main CDS page. Right now, special edition buttons and pages are tiny, and they aren't even in the navigation bar.
Higher retention at Special Editions
Once we guide the Spectator readers to the Special Editions, we must retain them. If they aren't satisfied with the experience, they will not return.
Good impression of Special Editions
Target users' willingness to come back to Special Editions rely heavily on if they enjoyed browsing through the page. Clicking through articles, searching for articles must be easy.
Lo-fi Mockups
I studied Morning Brew for my competitive analysis to learn more about how our competitors host more specific themed pages. Upon diving deeper, I found that they have a clear value proposition and have a concise, unsaturated layout. The effective usage of white space guides the reader's eyes to important images and headlines, making the user flow from the main page to individual articles much easier. Instead of having 3 big images of Special Editions themes filling up the whole page, I wanted to make things smaller so that one could look at more content without scrolling through.
Exploration
Half-way through the project, however, the Head of Product requested for an incorporation of digital archives as a part of the Special Editions page.
However, digital archives and Special Editions were two completely different entities, so we had to figure out a way to put them in the same place but make them distinguishable. I played around with ways that preserve the identity of Columbia Daily Spectator and maximize the efficiency of features in Special Editions. Upon discussions, we decided to have Special Editions boxes wider than archive posts. For this stage, we avoided using inner nav bars because 1) implementation of it would overly complicate things as there aren't that many Special Editions 2) delivering it wouldn't be technically feasible for the duration of this project. Furthermore, we also decided to have the hero section highlight one theme rather than promoting 4~5 different articles within a theme. The reasoning was that once a reader goes into a theme, each of them has a unique page that promotes and hosts various articles under it--so the highlighting of these articles would be somewhat inefficient here.
Final Look
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Reflection & Takeaways
Teamwork makes the dream work
Product @ Spectator has a close relationship with Engineering, as we collaborate in delivering our digital products. As we are in charge of envisioning our products and they are responsible for turning our visions into reality, a clear and frequent communication is key. Even as a trainee, I was exposed to both designers' and engineers' work places and how they meet weekly to share updates. Especially since digital products require cross-functional cooperations, maintaining a clear understanding for both parties is essential to effectively delivering our goals.
Trade offs...!
Another big thing I realized working at Spectator is that there are always trade offs between Product and Engineering. Whether it be due to lack of manpower to oversee a project or from technical challenges, Product always encounters a roadblock where they must reapproach their priorities and evaluate which of their original requests NEED to be delivered over others. Product Managers usually make these calls, as they are in charge of the designers under each project, but I was fortunate to observe my PM while they made a decision from Engineering's feedbak. Analyzing the availability of both Product and Engineering for other projects and evaluating which projects are in most need of the implementation, understanding both sides of the trade offs is extremely important for Product.
The update is now live, go check out the Special Editions articles!!!