Homepage and navigation redesign
Our task was to redesign The Sun Newspaper homepage which lacked any real sense of structure and that included a left sided navigation that contained 107 different options.
Client collaboration
This was a highly collaborative project, which began with a joint user profiling session, leading into a week long workshop.
This workshop included members from all of the different News International teams, and along with scheduled sessions, we employed an open door policy to our project space so members of The Sun’s team could freely come and go.
We also had two developers working with us throughout the week rapidly prototyping interactions and user interfaces.
Collaboration was key to changing the traditional mindset of the client, as it gave everyone involved a sense of joint ownership.
Finding focus
We used data analytics to try and refine the immense navigation system of 107 options down to three key areas: News, Sport and Showbiz. All other options were assessed and reduced to be placed within a ‘More’ menu.
The final design had to take into account the demands of the various teams at The Sun, in particular the commercial sales.
Final design
The homepage design focused on the three key subjects whilst integrating the secondary content further down the page.
Various tabbed elements allowed for large quantities of related information to be categorised and displayed clearly encouraging users the explore the content.
Outcomes
As our role in this project was purely design, the development was handled internally. This required a large and detailed about of documentation to accompany the working prototypes we created of some of the more important interactions.
A secondary outcome of this project was the fact we introduced a new way of collaborative working to the client. They went on to create their own internal UX team to continue to develop the site.
This project was completed in 2012, and the site has been redesigned since.