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USA TODAY ENHANCEMENTS
USA TODAY has been on the cutting edge for different facets for delivering the news. I was fortunate enough to be able to work on many different projects that dabbled in the emerging tech medium. Here are a few that I worked on.
Our old blog pages needed a refresh do to that fact that they were losing traffic. The solution came in the form of a page that was cleaner, more scannable and made social sharing more noticeable.
The goal was to come up with a couple of reusable templates that we could display on our fronts to promote big events and long form stories. Here are a few that I designed which were then featured on USA TODAY’s Homefront.
Promo Modules
Desktop and Mobile Web Video Player
Blog Page Redesign
The Video player controls are minimal on the Mobile Web variant due to the fact that users are accustomed to using their own devices native controls. This allowed me to focus more on the share since the majority of our traffic is coming from social.
The goal was to increase click through rate on our video content. After I conducted many user tests around this, the solution was to have thumbnails to the right of the player instead of below. A benefit to this was to also allow more of the article content in the viewport.
Trying to depart from the standardized YouTube’ish players I came up with a solution that would allow one codebase across different viewport sizes on desktop as well as on mobile. The bottom bar is a simple scrubber with click to drag controls and the play pause is hidden due to the fact of auto play. However all users know to click a video to play as well as pause so I was able to free up some real-estate on the player for a simpler more intuitive control layout.
Old Blog Page
New Blog Page
With the rebranding of USA TODAY five years ago came the refreshed desktop site. The site had a dark theme which at the time helped digest their use of large colorful images and videos. Five years later I was asked to “lighten” up the site. All article pages and fronts were getting white backgrounds and the navigation needed to play well with these changes. So I took the nav back to its simplest form.
USA TODAY's New Nav Bar
Old Nav
New Nav