Client
Value Retail
Online Magazine
Bringing a magazine online
Tasked by Value Retail to look at their online magazine, we set out to add some new and interesting features, only available in a medium that continually change, to help give the editorial a longer term relevance.
With articles focused on individuals, Twitter searches were setup for the individuals timeline, and subject matter of the article - bringing a hint of the most up-to-date content about the subject regardless of the publishing date.
For instance an article written about Tory Burch's retail line, would continually pull in any reference she makes to it on Twitter, to display as a 'highlight'.
Articles commonly get written in magazines with just a handful of places referenced. The reality is that we often don't visit an area solely for one activity. If we go to shop, we may want to stop for a coffee, a beer, maybe some food, visit a show, or take in a bit of sightseeing as well.
Aiming to create an online magazine with more context - we worked on how we could integrate these, without the article losing context - or requiring maintenance in their upkeep. As what may be great to visit this month, in 1 or 2 years time, may have closed - or there may be more interesting places to visit. Keeping an archive articles upto date with this information is not practical for an editor, but to facilitate this information to the reader, we integrated Foursquare into all articles that were location based.
With Foursquare as part of the content, supplementary destinations remain fresh. The highlighted places are continuously kept upto date by people visiting them in the real world, while Foursquare to showcase the most popular. So whether the article was written yesterday or 2 years ago, the locations remain relevant, and as a reader you can always find interesting places to supplement your visit.
My role
I led the concept, UX and design stages, and worked on prototypes and components with Value Retail's in-house development team.
The concept phase carried through a series of tissue sessions looking at what should be part of an online magazine and how to differentiate it from a traditional blog approach.
This was followed up by being producing the information architecture for the project, and working as design lead with Stew a junior designer at Story Worldwide working alongside me. We brought the offline editorial style the fashion audience were used to, to the screens they were using.
Following ironing out the IA and design, I produced a series of prototypes looking at handling loading of content across the magazine - when some parts were very image heavy. I worked on the integrations with Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare that are used throughout the magazine for the contextual and supplementary content within articles and the overviews. While producing data structures for the clients in-house dev team to fit with their implementation of Solr. All remaining and ongoing build work is done by the clients in-house team.