The Root Redesign
DESIGNING THE NEXT ITERATION OF A DIGITAL PUBLISHER
Fusion Media Group’s premier influencer publisher The Root was considering moving platforms. I was tasked with planning what the future of the brand’s content could look like. After meeting with the edtiorial team, we established the initial goal to revamp The Root’s visual aesthetic to better match their goals and make way for a cleaner user experience. Given the scope, we planned on making this an incremental redesign.
MY ROLES
UX, UI, Art Direction, QA
Since the greatest part of their audience came from their videos, we decided to start and test out the next UI on the video page. Even though video generated the largest audience views, continued viewing was abysmally low. To increase continued watching, we implemented autoplay-next to the videos based on playlist or similar, popular videos. Given the desire to keep users on the page, we decided to clean up the UI and create a more discoverable layout that focused on video playlists.
The Root TV
Knowing that a majority of traffic comes from social, we planned on next creating an article page that established the new visual direction and created a space for increased user engagement. With the implementation of the new typographical styles and UI, a user could better understand The Root as a hub of influential content. Restructuring the UX to be less crowded, we planned on generating an easier reading experience and creating premiere locations for recirculation units to increase further engagement.
Articles
A Curated Hompeage
The last major step was create a homepage that allowed an easier understanding for consumption, while establishing The Root as a leader in black influencers. The main insight we had that informed our UX direction was the ratio of content produced in a day to content seen on the homepage. We planned on creating more hierarchy with more prominent areas for content and less clutter. The new structure would be a feed of the newest content broken up by feature areas for categories, videos, galleries, and special initiatives. In this way, we would allow for return users to have something new to explore each time.
