The BuzzFeed Product Design Highlight Reel: Spring & Summer of 2022
A selection of design work from the BuzzFeed Product Design team
On the BuzzFeed Tech organization, our teams are consistently shipping small updates, new features, and entirely new products. Here’s a look at just a few things our Product Design team has worked on over the past few months:
Notification Inbox
Designer: Suleiman Shakir
Team: Sam Kirkland, Joseph Bergen, Joshua Walker
We’re creating an alternative and a more persistent way for users to view notifications. By creating an inbox that houses all notifications, users can easily access them at any time.
Why we’re excited about this
“BuzzFeed’s editorial voice is so strong and our audience development team is so creative in how they reach app users directly via notifications. But not all users choose to allow push, so they miss out on the smart curation and timely updates that pushes provide. Having an in-app Inbox exposes this content to more users, and we hope it’ll, um, push more users to consider allowing notifications when they see how useful and fun they can be.” — Sam Kirkland, Staff Product Manager
Social proof on Shopping Articles
Designer: Angela Medina
Team: Leora Katz, Vera Zhao, Jack Weiss, Rebecca Close, Vanessa Jimenez
Since we launched the new BuzzFeed Shopping experience, it’s given Shopping a whole new look and feel. However, the article experience remained untouched for a while — even though that’s where most of our users are. We’re turning our attention to shopping articles by incorporating the new branding while experimenting with ways we can increase affiliate link clicks and conversion, starting with social proof. We included a piece of copy that communicates the number of users interested in products on shopping articles. This was done with the hopes of giving shopping users more confidence when considering the product. We ran this as an experiment and the results were encouraging, so we’ll continue iterating on this experience to learn more!
Why we’re excited about this
“I’m excited about this feature because it’s a tried and true opportunity that can have a large impact on users converting once we crack the space” — Vera Zhao, Sr. Product Manager
“It’s interesting to see how our users engage with our shopping posts and what captures their attention to engage with products based on the social proof. Excited to see how our shoppers’ experience evolves as we also continue to iterate on this.” — Vanessa Jimenez, Software Engineer
Unified Quiz Builder
Designer: Mithila Tople
Team: Ivor Tossell, Sehr Ahmed, Petar Smolic, Sergey Laptiy, Carla Brady,
Special thanks: Ecem Ozturk, Mark Gono
Editorial partners: Sarah Aspler, Audrey Engvalson
The unified quiz project brings our quiz rendering and building products into one well-tracked technology. The new quiz builder combines the ability to build extremely clever and engaging quizzes, paired with a UI that reflects years of learning about what our quiz creators want and need. In doing so, we wanted to make certain types of quizzes easier to use and also created a new quiz type called the Calculator Quiz.
The goal for this project was to make longer and more engaging quizzes which are better monetized. In the month after it was released, the average length of quizzes increased by 125% for personality quizzes and by 196% for trivia quizzes.
Why we’re excited about this
“The launch of the new quiz builder was a huge milestone in our efforts to consolidate our many quiz formats into a unified product with a robust set of features that allow editors to create longer, more engaging, and better monetized quizzes.” — Sehr Ahmed, Engineer Manager
“It has been so great to see all the fun and weird quizzes that our editors have been making since we launched the quiz builder beta. It has allowed us to see the quizzes getting longer, more interesting, and be better monetized with every new feature that was released!” — Mithila Tople, Staff Product Designer
Tasty Community Feed
Designers: Lisa Maldonado & Allison Krausman
Team: Bryan Li, Will Kalish, Nicholas Gervais, Jean Pierre Figaredo, Glaiza Julian, Lizzy Grillo, Estefania Reichel
Ever feel like you don’t know what to cook? Bored with your usual go-to meals? Find new inspiration from what others on Tasty have cooked with the Community Feed! We are bringing recipes and images of those recipes by our Community members front and center in this feed. If you happen to enjoy a recipe, image, or advice shared, you can give it a like as well. Keep an eye out as we continue to update and iterate on this experience!
Why we’re excited about this
“This feature opens the door for more connection and comradery in our community, which is super exciting. We are hoping you all find this feed delightful, but also helpful as you seek out new recipes to cook!” — Lisa Maldonado, Product Designer
HuffPost Voices
Designer: Gabe Campo
Team: Kelly Hanshaw, Michael Dorfman, Pablo Valenzuela, Kyle Greene, Joel Souza, Kevin Mangubat, Marc Mance
Voices is a new section of HuffPost dedicated to telling the stories of people from marginalized communities. It will contain personal essays written by members of the community that are heartfelt, uplifting, sincere and sometimes witty. We wanted the brand identity and design to match this editorial voice, so we chose colors, fonts and layouts that were young, energetic and forward-thinking.
Why we’re excited about this
“We’re excited to have a new section of HuffPost dedicated to personal stories from a diverse set of writers that our readers can take inspiration from. This was also a fun opportunity to stretch what HuffPost can be, both from an editorial and aesthetic perspective.” — Gabe Campo, Sr. Product Designer
BuzzFeed Ad Manager (BAM) migration to Boostr
Designer: Esi Ozemebhoya
Team: Jane Bang, Ted Andricos, Brian Lee, Jean Kim, Bryan Harris, Alex Perevalov, Igor Matchenko, Jonathan Ginter, Marina Demianenko, Maxim Kapustin, Dominic Hanzely
Our Infra team reached a huge milestone, rebuilding a complex backend connection to our new order management system, Boostr. This was a tremendous effort that required collaboration between several internal teams and a new third-party partner. The last phase of this project required us to update the visual design of BAM’s Orders page which serves as a dashboard for all ad campaign information. We wanted to ensure that the quality of the user experience was maintained or even improved after this migration.
Why we’re excited about this
“This project required a lot of timed coordination between teams of different disciplines. We were able to relaunch BAM this summer and saw that our users received it well which is always an encouraging signal.” — Esi Ozemebhoya, Product Designer
BuzzFeed Shopping Redesign [iOS + Android]
Designer: Judith Leng
Team: Vera Zhao, Chad Brady, Ashu Kanitkar, Matt Luscher, Noelia Civitillo
In 2021, we launched a site revamp focusing on supporting shoppers with higher intent as they explore our content and consider a purchasing decision. Now on BuzzFeed Shopping, shoppers can search and navigate through multiple categories, peruse editorially curated posts and collections and get inspired by gift guides.
After seeing encouraging signals from the web launch, we brought the new experience to our native apps. We’re close to achieving parity across all platforms; a few exciting updates include the multi-layered category-based navigation, shopping-focused search, and featured stories. On Android, the category pages are dynamically themed, adding delight to product and content discovery.
Why we’re excited about this
“The redesign of BuzzFeed Shopping was a huge undertaking involving multiple teams. By supporting our users on a spectrum of intentionality, we are excited to meet more of our shoppers where they are and establish BuzzFeed Shopping as a destination with its unique offerings.” — Judith Leng
BuzzFeed News Social Share Component
Designer: Khalil Lajmi
Team: Laryssa Husiak, Ben King, Ian Chang, Alison Zack, Cristina Fuser, and Peter Kim.
As part of the BuzzFeedNews remaining accessibility issues flagged through our internal auditing platform, we have updated the sharing module buttons on article pages. The root of the issue was that the color combination did not meet the minimum color contrast required by the WCAG. The combination of blue (#1877F2) and white (#FFFFFF) only had a contrast ratio of 4.23:1. Additionally, we simplified the social sharing component and incorporated the comments CTA within the same module relying on tooltips for affordance and action confirmation.
Why we’re excited about this
“I like the work that Khalil has been doing on social share bars on BuzzFeed News. It’s a cool example of taking a ticket that started off as a failing color contrast issue, but provided an opportunity to rethink the component and fit more with the brand while also getting a win for a11y.” — Laryssa Husiak — Sr. Software Engineer
We’ve got even more good stuff coming, so keep an 👀 out for our next update!
You can follow us on Twitter @BuzzFeedExp.
