News portal
Product redesign

The project was part of a broader refresh of the news portal’s digital presence, including a new visual direction, updated look and feel, and logo exploration. From a product perspective, the work focused on how the news platform could better support readers, editorial teams, and business goals at the same time.

The project covered the core reading experience, including the homepage, article pages, navigation, mobile layouts, premium content logic, advertising placements, and the relationship between the website and app experience.

We started by understanding the existing product, business model, editorial workflows, and reader behaviour. This included stakeholder interviews, user interviews, analytics discussions, and a review of existing data sources, analytics, and internal knowledge.

A key part of the process was mapping the different expectations around the redesign: what readers needed, what the editorial team needed to control, what sales needed to sell, and what the product and development teams needed to implement.

From there, we worked iteratively through wireframes, layout systems, article templates, homepage scenarios, navigation concepts, and look & feel directions. The design process included regular reviews with stakeholders and close collaboration with visual design and development-side contributors.

The first fold

We explored how the homepage’s first fold should behave in different editorial situations, such as an average news day, a breaking news event, a weekend edition, or a high-priority feature story. The goal was to create a flexible system that could show enough important content without becoming visually chaotic or overly dense.

Article page experience

We explored how different article types should behave, including short articles, long reads, premium articles, branded content, and live/update-based formats. This included questions around reading progress, audio features, related content, paywall visibility, sharing, gifting, ad placement, and content recommendations.

Navigation system

The existing structure needed to support both quick access to fresh news and broader exploration by section or topic. We explored menu patterns, latest-news surfaces, mobile navigation, and ways to keep readers moving through the site without overwhelming them.

The main challenge was balancing reader experience with business and editorial needs.

• Business: the site needed to support ad visibility, longer sessions, deeper content discovery, and subscription conversion.
• Readers: the experience needed to remain clear, readable, and not overly interrupted.
• Editorial: the system had to be flexible enough to support different content types and publishing needs, but structured enough to avoid inconsistency and reliance on unwritten internal knowledge.

The project resulted in a redesigned digital experience direction for HVG, including clearer structural principles for the homepage, article pages, navigation, content modules, premium content handling, and advertising integration.

As part of the broader refresh, the platform also received a new logo, updated brand look, light and dark mode, and responsive desktop and mobile designs. The design team carried the direction through to full UI-level page templates for the key areas of the platform.

Read the case study on Stereogram

Our involvement ended with the design handover; the implementation phase was handled independently by another team.