TheStar.com

“Reimagining the future of online news”

Redesigning thestar.com was a fun, challenging, and intensely collaborative effort that touched on many aspects of the rapidly changing face of online news. Our task was to develop and implement fresh ideas for improving the news consumption experience from a front-end and systems perspective. We worked closely with The Star's online editors, marketers and IT team to enhance workflow and develop more powerful and flexible ways to craft the news.

Though the overall project mandate was relatively open-ended, we were encouraged to focus on a few things: rationalize the overall IA, make it easier for readers to find content of interest, develop richer, more media-enhanced experiences, cultivate conversations and community, and optimize/provide new ways and means for generating revenue.

New to thestar.com is a feature called Topics, which offers deep, ongoing coverage of stories and subjects of interest. Articles, media, interactive pieces are dynamically aggregated and curated by editors (who add abstracts, highlights, and milestones) to provide complete coverage.

Another prominent new feature we implemented, called News Views, allows users to choose their own interface. Visual News facilitates a passive browsing mode and showcases stories that have inherent visual interest. Timeline View lays headlines out in reverse-chronological order, like a blog, in order to show how the news day has evolved and give users a way to catch up on what's happened since their last visit; Grid View lays news into a streamlined format to facilitate skimming and eliminate distraction.

Visit our blog for more information about thestar.com redesign (more here).