Imagineering the 21st Century News Product
The washingtonpost.com Relaunch Project
Role: Director of User Experience
Problem
As an eager participant in the early days of online journalism, the enthusiasm and talent of the washingtonpost.com staff built a site with an astonishing quantity and quality of information. But the site was like a badly overgrown garden, leaving the organization unable to respond to or satisfy advertiser goals and incapable of effectively prioritizing projects or gauging the success or failure of their content and functionality.
Solution
I designed and led a massive, six-month discovery project with these ambitious goals:
- To outline an organization of content that would make it easy for users to satisfy their goals on the site
- To develop and align the site's user and business strategies
- To create a unified product strategy that could lead major improvements to the site's technical architecture and applications
- To leverage the expertise of more than half the staff without allowing that involvement to slow the progress of the project
My deliverables for the project included a comprehensive outline of the problem teamed with a detailed and holistic description of the solution. As I facilitated the work of various teams to inform the solution, I was also able to build deep, cross-departmental consensus.
I researched, wrote, designed, and illustrated the 65-page document that described all of these aspects. The document outlined user, business, and navigational strategies; a site structure; other related solutions; and an outline of the project's implications.
