Designing Guff’s Content Network

A viral media website and platform

3 min readOct 30, 2018

Overview

The Guff Network reaches 500+ million people, generates over 1.1 billion content views, and garners 200+ million video views per month.

My primary objective was to create a scalable website system that balances UX and monetization needs with the ability to display multiple layouts based on the traffic source and goals. For example, the same piece of content could be displayed as a standard, one-page article / infinite scroll list / full-screen slideshow / or paginated list.

Notes on the process

Using modular elements, I created a design system that could be easily adjusted and rearranged so that we could efficiently run A/B tests on layouts while maintaining a consistent look and feel for the user. This allowed for quick iterations and improvements, yielding significant upsides to Guff’s core metrics. Most notably, average time-on-site increased to over 4 minutes (+88%) across the publishing network. Not only has this drastically improved monetization potential on-site, but it has also allowed Guff to acquire more traffic as Facebook openly values time-on-site as a key engagement metric.