Objective

Redesign the Article Discovery Page, as well as the articles themselves, utilizing a new technology to provide a more modern user experience and improve SEO rankings.

Role

Competitive Analysis, Wireframing, High Fidelity Design, Design QA

Goals

• Utilize and create new base components for a new Design System in a new technology

• Modernize the Articles UI to appeal to tech professionals and display the large breadth of content on Built In

• Reduce page load and LCP times to improve SEO rankings

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Built In has been providing high-quality, specialized content for tech professionals for over 10 years. This content is core to Built In’s user acquisition strategies, consistently bringing in a stream of new and seasoned tech professionals. However, the underlying Drupal architecture was posing challenges with meeting modern expectations from users and search engines.

As one of the first projects to utilize a new backend technology as well as a new frontend framework, redesigning Articles allowed us to create core components for a new design system, modernize the UI for readers, and stay on top of SEO rankings.

Previous Design

Having been created in Drupal, the previous designs for Articles had always been difficult to update and lagged behind other areas of the site when it came to updates. The Article Discovery Page did a poor job of representing the breadth of content available, and without the ability to search for articles on the site it was difficult to find articles of interest. On the actual Article pages, the experience felt slow, old, and was especially troublesome on mobile. This was hurting SEO rankings, and subsequently hurting new user growth as well.

Initial Research

Since the goals of this project were more technical and UI focused, we elected to focus our research efforts on benchmarking the industry. We looked at numerous tech-focused publications as well as other popular content-heavy sites. We set out to understand how others in the market display large amounts of text in an easy to read format, and how to balance the hierarchy of multiple types of content on a single page.

Design + Impact

The redesign of Articles and the Article Discovery Page was extremely successful. Page load and LCP times went down, SEO rankings went up, and user feedback told us the visual redesign was welcome. This was just one piece of a big effort from the SEO and Editorial teams to facilitate big sustained growth for Built In.

+44%

YoY Article Views

+9.3%

YoY SEO Content Win Rate

+30%

YoY Overall Site Traffic