Redesigning a news portal: case O Popular
To celebrate its 80th anniversary, the newspaper 'O Popular' got a website redesign
The problem
Founded by Jaime Câmara Group — one of the largest media and communications groups in Brazil — the newspaper O POPULAR is an important and influential media company in the state of Goiás, Brazil. To celebrate its 80th anniversary, the news portal got a redesign.
The shift from print to digital had a huge impact on the editorial market, so it was essential that this new website would be aligned with the future of the company and its goals.
Guided by metrics and business strategies, the main goals of the project were to show content in an attractive way to readers and to increase the number of subscribers.
My role
We had a small team of three developers and two designers for this six month project. As Lead Designer, my role was to research, analyse, prototype and design the new User Interface. The new website was released on 3 April 2018.
The process
The desktop user (who spends more time on this website), than the mobile user, is what guided the focus of the project. The main goal of the redesign was to have the main page have as big a impact as the front page of a print newspaper.
Analysing click and heat maps, we gained some important insights into the behaviour of users of the website.
For example, click maps indicated not only that some buttons on the navigation bar — like newsletter subscription and social media— had almost no interaction by users, but also that there was a visual load caused by an excess of different colored buttons. The solution was to harmonize the color pallette and to distribute these buttons along the page, making the navigation bar clearer and more functional.
Wireframes
We had a problem concerning visual hierarchy on the main page. There was not much difference between spotlights and day-by-day news, so we created a variety of layouts — like breaking news, headlines and regular news — that brought forward versatility on the cover’s montage.
In this new structure, the content is divided between a ‘news of the day’ area and a sidebar — where there are supporting elements such as newsletter subscription, columnists’s highlights and most read articles.
Layout
A design system was created for accelerating the development of other products in the company’s portfolio — like the Jornal of Tocantins (a news website in the state of Tocantins) and the Jornal Daqui (which is another newspaper in the state of Goias, but whose target audience is different from that of O POPULAR’s).
The results
We have increased sales by 654% in the first three months after the release (Statistics from Google Analytics)
With this redesign we achieved a new look and feel which respects the newspaper’s 80 years of history and prepares it for the future. The product is now ready for new multimedia content such as Facebook Live, audio, video, and special articles. And together with the PopStore redesign — which is the e-commerce site for subscriptions to O Popular — we have increased sales by 654%. See PopStore's case.
