Fox News

Platform Migration & Redesign

Brand: Fox News

Role: User Experience Lead

Challenge

The platform faced significant challenges with content management, brand credibility, and findability. The site’s disorganized structure, ad-heavy design, and lack of clear content architecture led to a poor user experience, eroding reader trust and engagement. Readers often struggled to find relevant or timely information, leading to frustration and a noticeable drop in user engagement. This resulted in higher bounce rates and lower audience retention, directly affecting our traffic and ad revenue.  Internally, our editorial team faced inefficiencies as they spent excessive time editing images and managing content, which delayed publication and disrupted workflows. These challenges underscored the urgent need to streamline and improve our content organization. Our goal was to deliver a comprehensive site redesign to address these pain points, align business objectives with user needs, and elevate the brand’s digital presence.

Discovery 

We kicked off the effort by interviewing key stakeholders (editors, writers, advertisers, and leadership) to understand business goals, current challenges, and priorities. We gathered insights through user surveys, interviews, and focus group workshops to identify audience needs, pain points, and expectations. We reviewed the existing site’s content structure, tagging system, and categorization for gaps, redundancies, and inconsistencies. There were pages and features buried deep within unrelated sections. I interviewed the editorial team to understand their future vision for the site. We used card-sorting exercises to understand how users naturally group and prioritize content, aiding in the development of an intuitive site structure. 

Competitive Analysis 

Conducting a competitive analysis of various news sites provided valuable insights into content strategy and user experience, shaping design decisions to enhance engagement and usability. By evaluating navigation patterns, content hierarchy, personalization features, and interaction design, I identified best practices that improve readability and streamline content discovery. Usability heuristics, heatmaps, and user journey mapping helped uncover friction points and opportunities for optimizing user flows. Additionally, I analyzed subscription models, ad placements, and interactive elements to assess how different sites balance engagement with monetization. These findings informed design recommendations to improve accessibility, enhance visual storytelling, and create a more seamless and intuitive news consumption experience.

Navigation & Discoverability

Content was added to the site over time without a systematic strategy, leading to inconsistencies in categorization, tagging, and hierarchy. The lack of a cohesive content architecture made navigation challenging. Users struggled to locate relevant information due to poorly defined categories, an ineffective search system, and an absence of intuitive design patterns. Readers valued uninterrupted content consumption and quick access to information. Conducted a card-sorting exercise to develop a logical content hierarchy. We created intuitive navigation menus with clear categories and subcategories. We revamped the site search functionality, introducing filters and predictive search to help users find content more efficiently.

Design Strategy

News content is ever evolving and there was a need to create a design/development system that allowed for quick addition of new modules and ad units. Grid based design aims at solving a lot of the issues we were seeing on the site. Grid based designs declutters, allows for easier design collaboration, makes design and development of new modules quicker and provides a cohesive visual hierarchy needed for a content heavy news site. After numerous white board sessions, grid exploration wireframes and collaboration with other designers we found a grid layout system that worked for us. Throughout the design process, wireframes were continuously tested using InVision prototypes. Introduced interactive elements such as polls, quizzes, and multimedia to boost engagement. Adopted a clean, modern design aesthetic that aligned with the brand’s identity and reinforced professionalism.

Optimized Ad Placement:  Ads, a primary revenue stream, were prioritized over user experience. Articles were cluttered with ads positioned above, beside, and within the text, often disrupting the reading flow and giving the impression that the article had ended prematurely. This undermined the brand’s credibility and reduced reader trust. We learned that Ads needed better integration to support revenue goals without disrupting user experience. Conducted A/B testing to identify ad placements that supported revenue without compromising user experience. Redesigned page layouts to integrate ads seamlessly alongside content without disrupting reading flow. Added visual cues to distinguish ads from editorial content, enhancing transparency and trust. Introduced interactive elements such as polls, quizzes, and multimedia to boost engagement.

Validation 

We tested three iterations with a total of 30 participants using a usability testing software called Morae. I was able to analyze user navigational patterns/clicks and pain points in additional to being able to observe their facial expressions during the sessions. We presented the wireframes to editorial and product stakeholders for final approval once our usability sessions proved that the new designs had vastly improved find-ability and credibility issues that we needed to overcome. Addtionally we recruited editorial staff, employee from various departments and people at coffee shops to understand different perspectives around nomenclature around news content groupings. 

Enhanced Content Management System

Migrated to a robust CMS with improved categorization, tagging, and search capabilities. Introduced workflow automation for publishing, reducing errors and saving time for editors. Established content guidelines to maintain consistency in tone, format, and quality. Poor image quality and outdated UI didn't meet investors expectations. We worked with marketing to source better image quality and implemented responsive cropping to ensure images looked sharp across components and devices.