News.com.au
Role: Design Team Lead
News.com.au is Australia’s leading news site, delivering the biggest news events, from Australia and the world, and reaching an average monthly audience of over 12 million.
The digital news room is powered by a team of more than 60 dedicated journalists reporting the news across multiple platforms including desktop, mobile, social, podcasts and our app.
News.com.au keeps readers up-to-date with the news that matters; Be it politics, sport, lifestyle or entertainment. Designing for Content-Heavy news Websites is extremely challenging for any designer, especially from an UX, IA POV. Here is how my team and I successfully designed and launched news.com.au
Role: Design Team Lead
I first started working for news.com.au as a senior designer in 2007. In that time the news.com.au brand and product was non-existent and we built this Mastheads and brand from scratch. I began by creating UX/UI templates for the Entertainment section and creating bespoke and visual interactive stories for the editorial team as well as creating sales campaigns and pitch. In 2009 and 2010, I was nominated for Best Online Execution and Best sales pitch at the creative excellence awards. Late 2010, I was nominated Designer of the year, and promoted to Design Team Lead at news.com.au
Redesign
In September 2011 we launched the redesign of the news.com.au. Homepage + verticals and later on the mobile site that I led also.
The main concept behind the redesign was to display our news and featured content in a more engaging and visual way by enhancing a story’s main feature. We built the homepage for editors to be able to customise the top stories section with minimal producer, designer and dev input as a big story can break at any time!
We also wanted to display content and services in a clean and open layout, reducing the amount of text on the page so that it is easier for the audience to scan and find the content and services that are most relevant for them while showing all the great content from the network of NDM.
I led the project along with my colleagues Simon Wright (creative director), Portia Hilton (producer) and David Lewis (Tech Lead) and the Tech/Design/Editorial team.
My role was to assist and work closely with my creative director, Simon Wright in designing UX prototypes, building all the templates, UI elements and features for the homepage as well as creating bespoke stories such as the Queensland floods, Cyclone Yasi, Japan tsunami, Federal Budget….
while mentoring and leading the design team of 3 great designers from junior to senior.
We broke down the features into small products (weather panel, top stories, navigation…) and did ongoing user research.
Panpa Award
In 2011, NEWS.com.au took out the Innovation in Digital Publishing Award at the Annual Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers' Association (PANPA) awards, thanks to the creative and editorial team. The site was recognised for the major interactive pieces and the creative storytelling on breaking news events. Following this my creative director, the tech lead and myself were nominated for a News Award in November 2011.
Above are the top stories layouts that we designed and built for the editorial team so they can select what’s best for the story whether it is a LIVE BLOG, LIVE Coverage, Breaking News story…
We wanted to create more relevant information and services on news.com.au where readers could see the weather, top stories, TV guide, local news, find movies…that either link through to high-value NDM brands or to third-party transactional sites.
All the templates and mockups we tested with Simon Wright
