FINO BLOG

ux strategy and visual design

on to the next

 

 

The Fino design team felt strongly that the blog’s design didn’t represent the skills of our department or the culture of our company. We used a one-week Design Sprint, where we spent 1-2 hours a day redesigning the Fino Blog with the following goals in mind:

  1. Create a design for the Fino blog that represents the strengths of the design team and company culture
  2. Execute the team process in an ambitious, abbreviated time frame
  3. Present process, learnings, and design to the entire company at the end of the week
 

Problem:

Current company blog did not reflect company brand, culture, or talent.

Strategy

Monday: Competitive Analysis & Requirements Gathering

  1. Team members individually survey blogs, looking for best practices, innovative design, etc. Each person to be assigned one of the following: corporate/company blogs, general interest blogs, digital magazines, blogging platforms, design/UX research pertaining to blog best practices 

  2. Team shares findings and discusses

  3. Team develops a set of requirements for the Fino blog based on findings

Tuesday: Ideation & Sketching

  1. Review requirements from Monday meeting

  2. Individual sketching time

  3. Group white boarding and sketching; should culminate with a shared central vision

  4. Split in to two groups to flesh out remaining details, based on shared vision

Wednesday: Prototyping

  1. Divide and conquer—one group works on the landing page, the other the article pages

  2. Execute plan

  3. Complete a prototype that can be utilized for user testing

Thursday: User Testing

  1. Whole group learns how to use verifyapp.com

  2. Set up various tests as a group: A/B testing, menu, feedback, etc.

Friday: Iteration

  1. Review results of user testing

  2. Define any guiding principles based on testing results

  3. Determine how we want to update designs

  4. Discuss how we want to share with the rest of the organization

Research Findings / Blog Requirements

Landing Page

  • 1 big call to action (similar to: Huge.com/ideas)

  • Include summary of the article topic. Summary will be written specifically for this purpose (similar to: NYMag)

  • Curate a set of content categories. This is not the same as tags—tags are dead

  • Information hierarchy will make or break this page

  • Avoid visual clutter

  • We are positioning ourselves as experts speaking to our peers

Articles

  • Follow general guidelines for content usability: Big fonts, big margins, lots of space between chunks of content

  • Content authors should use bullet points in their writing to improve readability/skimability

  • Use design elements to improve readability/skimability, potentially for things like block quotes, executive summary, key takeaways, etc. 

  • Author photos

  • No comment section, instead encourage sharing via Twitter

  • Author contact information

DON’T CALL IT A BLOG. Ideas for section name:

  • Ideas

  • Thought Leadership

  • Journal

  • Concepts