The BuzzFeed Product Design Highlight Reel: Spring & Summer 2020
On the BuzzFeed Tech team our groups are consistently shipping small updates, new features, and entirely new products. Even during these challenging times, the team has continued to push important features to our audience. Here’s a look at just a few things our Product Design team has worked on over the past few months.
Quiz Party on BuzzFeed.com
Designer: Angela Medina
Team: Chris Johanesen, Joseph Bergen
Quizzes are a BuzzFeed staple and we wanted to grow them in a way that’s meaningful to our users. We know people already share their results as a way to connect with friends and family, so we created Quiz Party, a real time social game experience that allows users to take quizzes together and see everyone’s results at the end. Instead of finding out on your own that of all the *NSYNC members you really are most like Justin Timberlake, why not have your friends there to find out with you?
Quiz Party launched at the end of May and we have already seen a big positive response from our community. But we’re not stopping here. We’re planning on keeping the party going with a bunch of exciting new features in the coming months, so stay tuned for more!
Why we’re excited about this
“Building on our existing expansive library of quizzes and adding a new dimension, Quiz Party is the next step to making our already popular content even more interactive and engaging for our users.”
– Joseph Bergen, Staff Software Engineer
What’s In Your Kitchen in the Tasty app
Designer: Allison Krausman
Team: Sami Simon, Will Kalish, Graham Wood, Adrienne Fishman, Sikha Das, Lizzy Grillo, Jeremy Back
Ever find a bunch of mismatched ingredients in your kitchen and have no idea what to make with them? Our users have grappled with this for some time but it became even more of a common challenge once we were all stuck at home and grocery stores weren’t always fully stocked. Well grapple no more! Tasty is here to help with our new What’s In Your Kitchen feature. Simply tell us up to 3 ingredients you want to use and we’ll tell you recipes you can make with those ingredients. Not only is the feature helpful and easy to use, but it also gave us an opportunity to work with our illustrators and introduce some more vibrant and fun art into the app. What’s not to love?
Why we’re excited about this
“It was great to be able to give our users a feature that could be so useful during a time when it isn’t as simple to run to the store and grab a few more ingredients to make a meal. It is also a very useful tool in finding new recipes to cook with ingredients that we might otherwise let expire before we use them again!”
– Graham Wood, Senior Manager of Engineering
User Generated Product Reviews on BuzzFeed.com
Designer: Judith Leng
Team: Leora Katz, Chris Kelley, Dmitriy Ovsyannikov, Dmitriy Zhdankin, Patrick Carey
BuzzFeed is here to help you find the best products with our new user generated product reviews. Through our new review form, we’ll be able to gather product recommendations from our incredible BuzzFeed community. Loving that Justin Timberlake bobblehead you just found on sale? Tell us all about it! We’ll share some of our favorite reviews back with our readers to help everyone make more informed shopping decisions.
Why we’re excited about this
“We’re excited to hear about the products our readers are loving so we can find out about all the cool things out there, and share them with a larger audience.”
– Leora Katz, Product Manager
Pinned Quiz Results on BuzzFeed.com
Designer: Milan Samuel
Team: Jack Reid, Hana Carpenter, Sam Thurman, Mark Gono, Devin Argenta, Kiran Booth-Patel, Ekatherina Gutsol, Will Smith
We launched Pinned Quiz Results as a way to customize your BuzzFeed profile. Now, you’ll be able to show off which Justin Timberlake look most embodies your essence. Frosted tips JT? Buzzcut Justin? Let your friends know! Pinned Quiz Results are like a refrigerator door, or a creepy locker shrine, but online, on BuzzFeed. If that isn’t reward enough, you’ll earn a trophy for using it!
Why we’re excited about this
“Our users love tying their identities to personality quiz results. They’re consistently sharing what ages, Harry Potter houses, or Disney princesses they got, so I’m glad they won’t have to rely on a poorly cropped screenshot anymore! This feature really is just another step in making your BuzzFeed Community profile an extension of yourself.”
– Milan Samuel, Associate Product Designer
Quarantine Page on Tasty.co
Designer: Lisa Maldonado
Team: Bryan Li, Maria Enderton, Ian Feather, Jin Dai, Sikha Das, Melissa Harrison, Matt Dorville, Lizzy Grillo, Estefania Reichel
In order to make quarantine life a little bit easier we launched the Quarantine Cooking page on tasty.co. This page will feature some of our favorites through curated sections such as “Easy Recipes,” “Grocery Tips,” and “Baking Projects.” Whether you’re a beginner like me, or an experienced chef practicing for your day in the sun on Top Chef, you’ll find something fun and exciting to try out here.
Why we’re excited about this
“Everyone needs to eat, even during quarantine. People who rarely ever cook are finding themselves stocking a pantry or donning an apron, and we’re excited that this curated page of recipes, tips, and guides might make this process a little bit easier and more enjoyable for them and everyone else stuck at home.”
– Bryan Li, product manager
.bio Packages
Designer: Alex Gervais
Team: Jacqueline Yue, Cody Pumper, Nick Gervais, Kseniia Komarchuk
Our .bio page helps people coming in from Instagram find our most exciting content. In order to highlight our favs, we’ve added packages to the top of our .bio page. Say Justin Timberlake is trending. Now our strategists can quickly and easily share three exciting JT posts with you right at the top of the page. We did a lot of work to keep the Instagram mindset alive on this page, using patterns from there and other feed-based apps to make the transition from IG to .bio as smooth as possible. We also did lots of testing with our strategists to make sure creating and editing packages was as easy as possible.
Why we’re excited about this
“We think this is a great new way to help our social strategists curate .bio pages and get the best content in-front of our Instagram audience. We’re also excited because we want to continue to grow and engage our Instagram audience and this will help our audience more easily find content they like.”
– Alex Gervais, Product Designer
BuzzFeed Ad Manager (BAM)
Designer: Suleiman Ali Shakir
Team: Jane Bang, Brian Lee, Theodore Andricos, Alex Perevalov, Jonathan Ginter, Bradley Paknejad, Maxim Kapustin
Managing ads at BuzzFeed just got a lot easier with BuzzFeed Ad Manager, aka BAM, our new tool for our business team to manage ad campaigns. BAM comes with a bunch of exciting functionality such as advanced searching and filtering, access to media plans, and tagging features allowing users to assign team members to orders and line items. Imagine a world in which Justin Timberlake is running an ad campaign to raise *NSYNC awareness. Well now he can assign Lance Bass to all the right line items to make sure the campaign gets off the ground and onto your screen.
Designing and building BAM was no small feat. This was a long journey for the team, and we’re really excited to see it launch!
Why we’re excited about this
“I’m excited about BAM because it is going to help solve a lot of pain points and streamline our internal workflows. The team is constantly improving the tool and working on new features based on user feedback. I cannot wait to see how BAM grows after launch.”
– Suleiman Ali Shakir, Associate Product Designer
