The BuzzFeed Product Design Highlight Reel: Winter 2019–2020
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. 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:
User profiles on BuzzFeed.com and the BuzzFeed app
Designers: Hana Carpenter & Milan Samuel
Team: Dilip Rajan, Sam Thurman, Devin Argenta, Mark Gono, Jessica Kustra, Jack Reid, Ekatherina Prokofieva, Willem Smith IV
In our last update we talked about our launch of Internet Points. In the past few months, we’ve doubled down on features for our highly engaged BuzzFeed readers and have built new features for all logged in users. First, we introduced trophies, which users can earn by completing different tasks around the site. Then, we introduced on-site and in-app notifications for users — we now notify users when their comments get hearts or replies, in addition to notifying them when they’ve earned trophies or Internet Points. Most recently, we revamped our user profiles to better showcase these new features. This is just our first iteration; we plan to add even more features to the user profile over time. Stay tuned!
Why we’re excited about it:
“We think the new profile looks great, but we’re most excited about finally having a good foundation to make BuzzFeed into a more expressive and social platform for everyone.”
— Devin Argenta, Senior Software Engineer
Valentine’s day cards in the BuzzFeed app
Designer: Angela Medina
Team: Chris Johanesen, Joseph Bergen
For Valentine’s day, we launched an experimental feature that allowed users to make cards to share with friends and loved ones using templates and stickers. The feature leaned into templates that users are familiar with on platforms like Instagram to fill in meme-style formats with text, stickers, and emojis. We incorporated illustrations of Cuppy and Boggs into both the templates and the product experience to make this feature feel more delightful and alive.
Why we’re excited about it:
“With this project, we learned that our iOS app audience responded positively to an interactive experience outside of just consuming content. We’re looking forward to experimenting with more fun and useful features that bring our loyal users joy!”
— Angela Medina, Product Designer
Recirculation improvements on Tasty.co
Designer: Lisa Maldonado
Team: Sami Simon, Laryssa Husiak, Benjamin Stockwell
We want to make sure users that come to Tasty.co are able to find something suitable to cook. Previously, the only place users could find additional recipes to browse was at the bottom of the page. We had a hunch that after skimming through the ingredients, prep steps, and video, users made a decision on whether or not the recipe was right for them. We decided to move related recipes higher on page, bringing them above the tips. This helps users who decide a particular recipe isn’t quite for them, but may be interested in other similar Tasty recipes!
Why we’re excited about it:
“Users often discover our recipes in search results, and in those moments, it’s nice to be able to give them a chance to see and experience other recipes from our great library.”
— Benjamin Stockwell, Staff Software Engineer
Redesigned navigation on BuzzFeed.com
Designer: Angela Medina
Team: Chris Johanesen, Artyom Neustroev
Like many media companies that cover a wide range of topics, we’ve gone through more than a few iterations of what our navigation should be to best serve our audience. We cover everything from pop culture and entertaining quizzes to hard-hitting news from BuzzFeed News. We have some solid foundational topics we consistently cover, but we’re also good at responding to what’s trending on any given day. We redesigned our navigation on web to best serve both of these purposes: the top bar showcases topics that are important to our brand and rarely change, while the bottom bar showcases trending topics and give our users a sense of what is going on around the internet every day.
Why we’re excited about it:
“At BuzzFeed we’ve always tried to organize our site around what makes sense to our audience rather than have it conform to some internal structure. This new navigation system helps our audience more quickly find what they want and allows our editorial teams to quickly feature new topics and cultural phenomena without needing to micromanage the navigation.”
— Chris Johanesen, Principal Project Manager
A better search experience in the Tasty app
Designer: Allison Krausman
Team: Sami Simon, Will Kalish, Nick Bolton, Graham Wood, Jeremy Back
In the Tasty app, our users spend much of their time searching for recipes. In an effort to help our users find the things they’re looking for as fast as possible, the team identified the most popular searches and decided to surface them prominently within the search experience. Now, users can easily scan popular filters (like “chicken”) and dive into their results without typing a single word!
Why we’re excited about it:
“I’m really excited about this feature because it’s both a natural evolution in the product as well as something users will really love. Now knowing what our users most often search for, we can make it even easier to execute those searches and match each user with the perfect recipe”
— Sami Simon, Staff Product Manager
We’ve got even more good stuff coming, so keep an 👀 out for our next update! You can also find us on Twitter @BuzzFeedExp.
