Modernising experiences at The Economist's partnerships wing
The Economist Group / 2024
Contents
Architecture & navigation
The Economist Impact estate was made of a series of disconnected sites that had no way of linking users or content between them, built up sporadically over years.
Me and my team redesigned the navigation experience and site architecture to solve these issues.
New Products
Ask Impact
Taking advantage of the new opportunities granted by AI, I created a new product offering of a document assistant, which could be sold to clients to expand deal size and to add user value by giving more digestible ways they can learn, while preserving the depth of Impact's work.
The new Ask Impact product could scale to various sizes of programs, wider initiatives, or site wide if the business required.
It would also allow the company to further cement its reputation by creating a 'library' of content, helping users navigate to new content and insights.
Article redesign
Economist Impact articles had been consistently underperforming, not easily meeting expected KPIs. A review of the analytics suggested that users were landing on pages but not scrolling beyond the header.
User testing confirmed this when they described headers as “dated”, “boring” and “dry” - so I set about modernising them.
The new design made a few key moves:
Removed the text overlay on the image to improve accessibility, reduce production time, and improve vibrancy of colours in the image (by removing need for grey overlay).
Changed layout to be based on available media, not making producers find media to fit layouts.
Changed visible tags from article type to article themes, to bring it in line with user expectations.
Used a background fill to further distinguish the branded content from the newspaper content.
Changed author module to a linked text field, instead of attempting to standardise the appearance of affiliate author pictures.
Brought sponsor tag into the centre of the page to increase link between the sponsoring company and the content.
Landing page
As part of the redesign of Impact's architecture, I redesigned the homepage experience to align with The Economist's core value proposition, optimising for users finding new content they did not know they wanted to know about.
Final designs under development
