The BuzzFeed Product Design Highlight Reel: Fall 2019
A selection of design work from the BuzzFeed Product Design team
On the BuzzFeed Tech team, our groups are consistently shipping small updates, new features, and entirely new products. Back in June, we shared some highlights from the first half of the year. Here’s a look at a few things our Product Design team has worked on in the past few months:
Shoppable Recipes in the Tasty App
Designer: Allison Krausman
Team: Sami Simon (Product Manager), Amy Filmore (Director, Project Management), Shema Kalisa (Project Management), Will Kalish, Graham Wood, Aljosa Cucak, Randy Karels, Benjamin Stockwell (Engineers), Jeremy Back, Lizzy Grillo, Estefania Reichel, Paula Yanuszczyk, Gabriela Conde Moreau (QA), Jarvis Miller (Data Scientist)
For Tasty’s biggest project of the year, we partnered with Walmart Grocery to make recipes shoppable in the Tasty iOS app. Walmart Grocery makes grocery shopping easier by offering curbside pickup and delivery at thousands of stores across the U.S., so this partnership was a natural fit for Tasty, as we’re all about making cooking easy and accessible. We collaborated with Walmart Grocery to craft a native shopping experience in the Tasty iOS app, which allows users to easily add recipes ingredients to their Tasty Grocery Bag, then check out with Walmart Grocery. Together, Tasty and Walmart Grocery are making the process of meal planning, grocery shopping, and cooking a little less daunting. Our Tasty users are loving this new feature, and we do too.
Why we’re excited about it:
“It can sometimes feel like a challenge to find a feature that both brings joy and utility as well as business value. However, shoppable recipes never suffered from that challenge. From the beginning, the concept felt like it perfectly combined what our users need in their lives and what services we could provide in partnership with Walmart. This is by far one of the most exciting projects I’ve gotten to work on at BuzzFeed!” — Sami Simon, Senior Product Manager
“Shoppable recipes is a very unique feature in the Tasty app and was a true team collaboration. It was exciting to work with new technologies that allowed us to take a recipe, translate it into real grocery store products, and then pass that information to Walmart. We stepped into a lot of new territory from an engineering and design perspective and it was very rewarding to work through those problems together. I think we delivered a very strong feature and it’s great to see real users finding it helpful in their lives.” — Will Kalish, Senior Software Engineer
Internet Points
Designers: Noga Raviv, Sofia Millares
Team: Dilip Rajan (Product Manager), Jack Reid, Noshin Begum (Engineers), Katherine Gutsol (QA), Brian Clifton (Data scientist)
BuzzFeed Community is made up of BuzzFeed readers who love to write their own posts and quizzes. When we introduced the BuzzFeed Community years ago, Community Members could earn “Cat Power” for hitting significant milestones like getting a certain number of views on a post they created. Although Cat Power has been coveted by Community Members, the system had reached its limits as a robust method of gamification, as there were only 5 levels of Cat Power. Alas, “Internet Points” were born. Internet Points will replace Cat Power as the new gamification system for rewarding Community Members for actions like writing posts, having them promoted to the homepage, and getting lots of views. Internet Points will enable us to reward Community Members more often and for more things!
Why we’re excited about it:
“Most users contributing content to BuzzFeed are doing it as a hobby! So we’re excited that internet points and our other upcoming gamification features (watch out for trophies!) will make our contributors’ experience even more fun and delightful. We’re also looking forward to building out ways that users can trade in their internet points for special rewards.” — Dilip Rajan, Staff Product Manager
“This is a really great foundation for deepening the logged-in experience for users. We’ve got a points system we can build on top of and I’m most excited to hook it into all kinds of behaviour across the site, whether it’s making content, contributing to the community in comments, or just taking a ton of quizzes. It’s going to be really cool to show users that we appreciate their engagement.” — Jack Reid, Senior Software Engineer
Simplified Navigation
Designer: Angela Medina
Team: Kate Zasada (Product Manager), Plum Ertz (Engineer), Yeny Santoso, Dmitriy Ovsyannikov (QA), James LeDoux (Data Scientist)
In order to simplify the experience of reading an article on buzzfeed.com on a phone, the Site team set out to experiment with different variations of the share and nav bars. This updated reading experience removes any persistent UI from the page as you scroll through an article. When you begin to scroll back up, a slim version of the nav appears with share buttons. We know that scrolling back up the page is a signal that you might be done with that article, so it’s a good time to prompt you to share. When you fully reach the top of the page, the full version of the nav reappears. We’re excited to remove some cruft from the reading experience and look forward to iterating on it!
Why we’re excited about it:
“Our main goal as the Site team is to ensure BuzzFeed users have the best reading experience there can be. With this update, we removed obtrusive share options on the page being more thoughtful about when to make them available to users. Best of all, we saw an increase in pages visited per session which signaled engagement on the improved experience.” — Angela Medina, Product Designer
“Sharing options were featured prominently on our site as a holdover from the days when blasting a link to your entire Facebook friend list was common, but people have shifted over time to be more selective about the platforms and channels where they share things they like. We hypothesized that the prominent placement on posts was no longer worth the distraction from your reading experience, so we could free that space up and make it easier and more enjoyable to read a post on BuzzFeed. It was exciting to see that validated in the increase in engagement we saw when we removed it!” — Kate Zasada, Senior Product Manager
Prime Day
Designer: Hana Carpenter
Team: Swara Kantaria (Product Manager), Patrick Carey, Rebecca Close, Tyler Abrams, Robert Bruce, Dmitriy Zhdankin (Engineers), Yeny Santoso, Dmitriy Ovsyannikov (QA), David Lin (Data Scientist)
Prime Day has transformed into one of the biggest shopping holidays of the year and each year, our shopping writers put together a TON of articles curating the best deals from Prime Day to help our readers figure out what to buy. Every Prime Day we feature this content prominently on buzzfeed.com, and for 2019 we created some sweet illustrations to go along with our featured units. We also built a fun interactive unit that revealed surprise deals each time you clicked on it!
Why we’re excited about it:
“This Prime Day was our biggest Prime Day in the history of BuzzFeed. During the 48 hour sale, we sold about two times as many products and significantly increased our pageviews compared to last year. It was so awesome to be able to learn from last year’s tech investments and improve the user experience to drive higher engagement.” — Swara Kantaria, Staff Product Manager
“Prime Day this year allowed us to experiment with some interesting engineering projects. The “Good Deal Finder” product required us to spin up a new API that was driven by real-time data. We had never attempted a user-facing project with real-time data. The team definitely faced challenges but it was a really interesting project that lays the groundwork for how we can leverage data like this to build products in the future.” — Patrick Carey, Engineering Manager
Video Playlist Ad Unit
Designer: Suleiman Ali Shakir
Team: Bryan Harris (Product Manager), Tami Olafunmiloye, David Zhao, Brian Lee (Engineers), Max Kapustin (QA), James Ledoux (Data scientist)
We’re always trying to find new ways to come up with ad products that both our clients and our users will enjoy. The new Playlist Ad Unit on buzzfeed.com joins together preroll ad inventory and a playlist of BuzzFeed videos. This playlist promotes videos from our beloved BuzzFeed video brands like Worth It and Bring Me, giving users a new entry point into discovering videos on BuzzFeed and our business team access to high-performing preroll inventory to sell in front of this video playlist.
Why we’re excited about it:
“I really like this ad format’s ability to meet advertiser needs by allowing for control and targeting as well as context of viewership, and this unit opens up pre-roll demand opportunities for our biz team that previously did not exist on our O&O properties.” — Ken Blom, SVP, Branded Distribution and Advertising Operations
“We’re really excited about the potential of this new ad format. It’s non-obtrusive to our user experience, solves a major need for our clients, and exposes our audience to all of our amazing edit video content. We are particularly pleased with how well the design took shape — this format feels very native to the site and adds value to our ad experience.” — Bryan Harris, Senior Product Manager
We’ve got even more good stuff coming, so keep an 👀 out for our next update! If this work sounds interesting to you, we’re hiring Product Designers, Engineers, Data Scientists, and will be opening up new roles soon. You can follow us on Twitter @BuzzFeedExp.
