2021 in Review: Industry Dive Product Design
In 2021, the Product Design team focused on improving the user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) of all of Industry Dive’s publication websites and aligning them with a new company-wide brand vision. We also redesigned multiple acquired products and integrated them into the Dive product family.
An overview of our biggest projects:
- Redesigned and relaunched acquired publication websites in the pharmaceutical and finance industries
- Redesigned and relaunched an acquired online community for finance professionals
- Created a “Storylines” feature for our Dive publications that helps business leaders keep up with events unfolding in their industry
- Updated the UI of our publication websites to align with our company-wide brand strategy and improve the reading experience
- Helped users get in touch with the appropriate Dive staff member by creating clear outreach funnels across our publication websites
- Helped the product team triple, year-over-year, the revenue of our press release service, DiveWire, by creating purchasable add-ons and campaign reports
Redesigning newly acquired publications
CFO.com
In late 2020, we acquired CFO.com, a finance publication with a bi-monthly print and digital magazine focused on news and trends coverage. Dive leadership established a clear strategy for CFO — grow the publication into a top online destination where finance professionals can learn from the stories of successful peers across multiple industries. While CFO already had a well-recognized brand when we acquired it, the website design did not align with our updated vision for the future of the publication. It was clear we needed to redesign the site. Our high-level goals for the CFO.com redesign were to maintain the original brand equity, align the interface with CFO’s revised editorial model and provide high-impact advertising placements for future clients.
Through visual and information architecture updates, we reframed CFO.com as a source for finance industry profiles, Q&As, and narrative-driven content, rather than a destination for people searching for the latest industry news.
We aimed to style the components to look and feel like a premium online magazine. One way we did that was to prominently feature images across the site, especially on the home and article pages.
We also used large serif fonts to create a premium, editorial aesthetic. On the advertising side, we designed stylized lead generation placements and found ways to reduce friction in accessing gated content. The new site design and sponsorship placements helped us close a historic three-year exclusive sponsorship with Oracle NetSuite.
“The CFO/NetSuite partnership is the biggest deal in Industry Dive history, and the redesign of the look, feel, and experience of the site has been instrumental not only in getting the deal closed but in ensuring success in the partnership in the future. The product design team was able to make the site differentiated, striking, and balance the prioritization of the audience experience and the sponsor experience. It’s really set us up for success in this innovative new partnership!”
– Jane Qin Medeiros, GM studioID
Team
- Product Designers: Christina Chiang, Natalie Forman, Julia Himmel
- Product & Engineering: Megan McCoskey, Jane Qin Medeiros, Rhythm Shahriar, Sadman Shawmik
Proformative
Proformative joined Industry Dive’s product portfolio as part of the CFO.com acquisition in late 2020. The site was originally an active community where early and mid-career finance and accounting professionals could turn for career advice and industry certifications. Over time, Proformative’s community became less engaged due to a number of factors, including an increasingly dated UI and a lack of fresh, valuable content.
Our redesign of Proformative aimed to fix security and compliance issues, align the site with the Industry Dive brand, and create a foundation to nurture and monetize its unique audience.
We started the redesign process by migrating Proformative’s existing content to the content management system (CMS) and UI that Industry Dive uses for all of its publication websites. While this transition provided a secure site architecture, the community-first focus of Proformative was not well-served by our standard news-centric website design.
To create a more tailored experience for Proformative users, we developed a new homepage, top navigation bar and community Q&A page.
Team
- Product Designers: Christina Chiang, Natalie Forman, Farah Lopez
- Product & Engineering: Tony Bagdon, Eric Falchier, Simon Gigli, Mays Rubaye, Derek Sharp, Robin Varghese
PharmaVoice
PharmaVoice was acquired in September 2021 and quickly became the third redesign of the year. The business published a print magazine and podcast and hosted an annual in-person event — all focused on recognizing the work of professionals in the life sciences space. Industry Dive’s vision for PharmaVoice was to grow the brand into the leading publication for life sciences leaders, a vision that built upon the company’s original mission. Similar to the Proformative redesign process, we started the project by migrating PharmaVoice’s existing content to the CMS and UI that Industry Dive uses for all of its publication websites.
After the content migration, we faced another challenge; we did not want the site to look identical to BioPharma Dive, an Industry Dive publication with similar content. We also wanted to tailor the PharmaVoice website design to closely align with the publication’s focus on the “voices” within the life sciences. This meant we needed to visually elevate content like Q&As, podcasts and interviews.
To highlight the “voices” editorial model, we designed a new top-level navigation experience, which includes a drawer for “voices” content and the “PharmaVoice 100” industry awards. We also iterated on existing components, such as our sidebar boxes, and created a new sidebar box for the “Woman of the Week” podcast.
Team
- Product Designers: Christina Chiang, Natalie Forman
- Product & Engineering: Tony Bagdon, Megan McCoskey, Rhythm Shahriar, Sadman Shawmik
Enhancing the reader experience on Industry Dive’s business news websites
Management of Trends
The editorial strategy for Industry Dive’s 20+ publications centers around surfacing insights about key trends in the industries we cover. Our coverage of trends is a core reason business leaders turn to Dive news products. Unfortunately, until recently, it was hard for editors to change the topic labels on our Dive publication websites via our CMS.
In 2021, we aimed to better serve our readers by providing the editorial team with the ability to easily manage their publication topics. To do this, we designed a way for editors to migrate and group topics.
This feature enabled all Dive publications to update their topics to better align with their editorial strategy and own them moving forward.
Creation of Storylines
Along with following overarching trends, our editorial team also covers timely events in their industries. While their insights and articles often follow ongoing events, they lacked a way to group this content. To address this issue, the Dive Product Design team created a way for journalists to easily package and highlight stories related to a specific event. We called this new feature, “Storylines.”
In addition to designing the CMS features that allow editors to build a Storyline, we created a carousel component for our news posts to surface a Storyline to readers.
We plan to expand the Storyline product offering in 2022.
The new topics and storylines architecture has given our editorial team the ability to better represent our stories to own and what matters most to readers in our product. For readers, this is increasing the visibility, access, and value of our most important coverage, and connecting the dots between individual stories where they are an important trend or storyline in the market.
– Davide Savenije, Editor-in-Chief
Team
- Product Designer: Julia Himmel
- Product & Engineering: Tony Bagdon, Eric Falchier, Simon Gigli, Mays Rubaye, Derek Sharp, Robin Varghese
Refreshing the UI of Industry Dive’s business news websites
In 2021, we updated the design of the UI used by all of Industry Dive’s 20+ publication websites to more closely align it with recently revised Dive brand assets — new typography and colors. By better mirroring the Dive parent brand, we sought to create a more cohesive and memorable experience for our readers. In tandem with these branding updates, we improved the styling of many of our core UI components and the layout of our article pages.
- We created a stronger brand presence, with updated color, typography and branded illustrations.
- We built a new newsletter signup component at the bottom of article pages that quickly became one of our top lead generation spots.
- We designed simpler and more modern components, including new call-to-actions, headings and labels.
My team focused heavily on brand development last year and partnered with the Product Design team to translate that onto our pub sites. By working closely together, we created the best user experience and brand expression simultaneously. I’m thrilled with how it came together in this UI refresh — the Dive brand is really evolving across the board.
– Michelle Rock, Senior Director, Brand & Marketing Design
Team
- Product Designers: Natalie Forman
- Product & Engineering: Tony Bagdon, Colin Burr, Dan DiCocco, Mollie Goforth, Dusan Puletic, Yujin Kim
Making it easier for readers, clients and PR professionals to contact our team
To help readers, clients and PR professionals efficiently connect with our editorial, marketing and sales teams, we redesigned our Dive publication outreach funnels. Previously, all form submissions, no matter the subject, were sent to the entire editorial team. This @all approach resulted in a lot of spam emails distracting team members and actually important messages falling through the cracks.
Two of our top goals for this project were: ensure Dive staff never miss valuable messages and decrease the distraction of spam. With these objectives in mind, we updated our outreach forms.
- In our global site footer, we replaces a generic outreach form with a group of specific contact links that are important to our clients.
- On the main contact page, we added a dropdown menu in the outreach form so users can indicate the reason for their submission and we can route them to the appropriate team.
- On our editorial team page, we included relevant calls-to-action and changed our team list to two-columns as the publications now have larger teams.
Team
- Product Designers: Farah Lopez
- Product & Engineering: Willie Brown, Mark Chae, Dave Frame, James Holcombe, Xavier Rivera-Lanza
Driving more revenue by adding new features to our press release service, DiveWire
New checkout features
Over the course of 2021, we designed three new checkout features for our press release distribution service, DiveWire. These new features aimed to increase the average order value of DiveWire transactions and make our press release product competitive with larger newswire services.
- Multimedia gallery — This new feature helps our clients tell their stories by adding visual assets related to their press release. The images and videos that our clients upload also provide Dive and other journalists with content to use in related stories they write. The multimedia gallery accommodates images, videos, GIFs, and 3rd-party links from YouTube and Vimeo.
- Crossposting — This new feature allows PR professionals to share their press releases across multiple Industry Dive publications without having to repeatedly go through the DiveWire checkout process.
- Newsletter add-ons — The newsletter add-on feature allows clients to reach more readers by promoting their press releases in our topic-based newsletters.
Team
- Product Designer: Farah Lopez
- Product & Engineering: Willie Brown, Mark Chae, Dave Frame, James Holcombe, Xavier Rivera-Lanza, Jess Saba
Product performance reports
To increase customer retention and satisfaction, we designed press release performance reports — the DiveWire visibility report and campaign wrap-up report. These reports visualize impression and engagement data to help customers assess the performance of their news announcements. The reports also tell the story of where the press release was displayed on the website and in the newsletter and provide the customer with links to their announcements. The report template incorporates the client logo for a more personalized appearance.
“The visibility reports save the sales team time as they no longer have to research and report metrics to clients. Clients have said that the reports help them track how their campaign is going, and understand how it went. Plus, they appreciate being able to share the reports with their teams and compare campaign results over the course of the year.”
– Jess Saba, Senior Director of DiveWire
Team
- Product Designer: Farah Lopez
- Product & Engineering: Willie Brown, Mark Chae, Dave Frame, James Holcombe, Xavier Rivera-Lanza, Jess Saba
