With the ever-changing demographics it is crucial for any news website to stay in sync with the ways and means through which their content is being consumed, same was the case with The Hindu — one of the most highly regarded national daily in India. They felt that their news website was not in sync with the way and devices through which the younger demographic consumed the news, thus creating a need for a contemporary design which will ideally incorporate the way in which the long time loyalists are used to consume the news along with modernisation of the whole experience to meet the expectation of younger demographic.
Roles and responsibilities
Work done for Itu Chaudhuri Design in 2016
Design Team: Lisa Rath, Kshitij Tembe, Niloy Kundu, Avi Agarwal.
I served as a project lead and worked under creative direction of Lisa Rath ( Team Lead and Principal ). Given the small size of the team my responsibilities were not restricted to one particular task I was thoroughly involved in development of both UX and UI design.
Work done for Itu Chaudhuri Design in 2016
Design Team: Lisa Rath, Kshitij Tembe, Niloy Kundu, Avi Agarwal.
I served as a project lead and worked under creative direction of Lisa Rath ( Team Lead and Principal ). Given the small size of the team my responsibilities were not restricted to one particular task I was thoroughly involved in development of both UX and UI design.
How it was done
Our first step towards the re-design was gaining an understanding and assessing the rich and wide spectrum of content that The Hindu was offering and also the behaviour of the readers consuming the news. This understanding led to the development of an extensive new Information Architecture in which we identified the key sections and developed new content carriers leading to a system where finding information was easy and predictable. One of the outcome of this intensive process was creation of The Hindu Specials which encases four types of special content carriers that the old site failed to highlight and display. These specials showcased curated content on a wide variety of subjects that have been designed for the user to explore and read in-depth at a single destination.
The specials consists of — Package: a collection of recent articles covering various aspects of a major current event, Series: a curated list of historic and recent articles for a particular event or an occasion, Case-files a compilation of facts and figures in a chronological order of an event or a happening that has been going on over a large span of time, Microsite an auxiliary website which consists of detailed data and info dedicated for a particular event like elections or world cup. These special formats made the news more consumable thus attracting readers of all demographics, researchers and advertisers looking for current and accurate news in one place.
After finalising the IA we moved on to development of detailed wireframes. We made the wireframes across all devices to make sure that the user flow and experience remains consistent with zero redundancies, "the key was to make sure that user gets values from every single click he/she makes " - Lisa ( during our wireframe discussions). Some of the key features which made the aforementioned possible were :
Cardified approach for content division
The cards presented a clean, trim canvas for information,and gave news articles a clear entity which embodied sufficient information for a desired call to action.
Creations of zones with stronger identity
The whole website was conceived in horizontal zones with a dedicated right hand side column which was meant for editor's pick for the section, important articles, trending articles under a particular section or topic and internal advertisements. The horizontal zones enabled the user to hide/unhide the sections, visit the detailed landing page or even follow the section.
Catering to the user’s impulse.
A user’s impulse to exit the page and go to any other point in the website or share an instance he/she likes on social media and even increase in subscriptions were catered through strategic placement of visible subscription points, share buttons and a carefully crafted comprehensive masthead ( which becomes sticky header when scrolled down) which is omnipresent and enables a reader to access any material on the site — from The Hindu’s social media’s presence, e-paper, search bar, curated link to all the major sections and a hamburger menu encompassing all the sections The Hindu has to offer. The masthead also provides space for the editorial team to highlight trending topics and special coverage and when the mast head appears in the article page it also shows the headlines from the JUST IN tag.
