This large-scale site redesign was part of an overall rebrand for 9&10 News (soon to be 910 News) of Heritage Broadcasting based out of northern Michigan. The project also included the development of a custom design system comprised of reusable styles and modular building blocks to easily accommodate future site addition needs.
Year: 2021 - 2022
Tasks: UX/UI, Copywriting, Visual Design
Tools: Axure
Client: 910 News of Heritage Broadcasting
Collaborations: PM, Lead Developer, Art Director
Goals & Challenges
The primary goals for this large-scale project were to design an accessible, modern UI that complimented the new logo and construct a more organized content structure to create an overall better user experience for readers.
As is common with many non-corporate projects, a close secondary goal was to remain cognizant of the development time my design work would require as the developers were operating with a very lean team and faced an additional challenge of learning a new content platform (Arc XP).
Deconstruct to Reconstruct
In addition to news, the existing site contain multiple special sections including Weather, Community, Veterans Resource Station, The Four and Watch Now / Video:
Sports lived as a separate brand and on its own domain. The business wished to integrate the sports section into the 910 domain while maintaining its unique MISportsNow branding:
Content Organization & Categorization
At the heart of any good news site is well structured content. While each section included a sidebar category list on desktop, on mobile it was responding naturally to the bottom of the article list and the mobile menu only offered navigation to parent categories. All article cards/listings and pages were devoid of categorization and tags.
Planning a Custom Design System
Before starting on any wireframe and layout work, I wanted to first define the grid, foundation styles and building block components that I could modularly build page layouts with and upon.
Colors & Fonts Came Predefined
The Art Director had recently received business approval for the new logo, so the brand colors (910 News Blue) and primary font (Futura) were already well defined:
Modular Building Blocks
Coming soon
MISportsNow Brand
Coming soon
New OnDemand Section
Coming soon