vogue-backup.gif

Vogue

As Product Design Lead for Vogue, I spearheaded innovative design initiatives to redefine the digital presence of one of the most iconic brands in the industry.

2020-2021

TLDR: Designed, prototyped & tested concepts for north star initiatives, championed best practices for accessibility and performance, and worked collaboratively with stakeholders across key markets.


Before I joined Vogue, a journey mapping project had been undertaken across key markets; UK and India. The research was pivotal in understanding how audiences engage with Vogue and resulted in key journeys.

This work underpinned our product strategy and helped to define our north star for improving the Vogue experience.

Vogue-Research.jpg

As with any product, a north star is what keeps your eye on the prize. A flag in the sand to bring alive the product vision and ensure it aligns to user and business needs.

To explore how we might evolve the experience for our users, we established 3 pillars to anchor back to our main user journeys;

  1. Personalisation
    To allow consumers to shape their experience according to their preference

  2. Curation
    Provide high quality curated content leveraging our brand’s authority

  3. Immersion
    Inspire consumers with the elegant imagery and design that make our brand iconic

What are you looking at?

As part of Personalisation, we undertook a series of interviews that aimed to get a better understanding of a users relationship with Vogue, not just their journeys, but to learn more about how they wanted Vogue to work for them and fit in with their lifestyle. Customers frequently told us they wished they could get closer to the action, and the site would know them a little more.

Through a series of workshops, we unpacked this further and explored the idea of putting the user at the heart of the experience, leveraging users loyalty and keeping them engaged through personalised content, to create a Vogue that meets their needs.

The simple act of saving an article to read later was popular, with most people reading long-form over the course of a days commute, or hopping from one flight to the next without internet. Following authors was also important with users, and being kept up to date when a favourite designer or photographer was mentioned.

Vogue-MyVogue-01.png
Vogue-MyVogue-02.png

It's everywhere that you go

We identified a recurring theme, that users felt they were missing out on key moments and were often pushed towards social media to stay closer to the action. Users viewed the website in one dimension that wasn’t comparable to an experience they would get elsewhere.

This raised some interesting questions, not least, whether our north star and the future of Vogue was a website or not. We already had success with Runway—an app, dedicated to...runways—but what was stopping us from envisioning a world where Vogue existed in-app only. An interesting thought, right? And one we didn’t share too loudly with wider stakeholders until we investigated further, but it got us working on an idea.

Taking what we learnt from saved articles, we explored a concept called Spotlight; a new layer to Vogue that’s accessed globally in the top nav and delivers new content the moment it's published.

And it's really unique in that respect, that no other component can deliver content across the site like it. It’s also where personalisation really comes into its own - a mode of discovery that surfaces up all the things you like and follow.

On the cover of a magazine

Customers repeatedly shared that consuming visually appealing content is one of the core reasons for using our channels, and not just through great photography, but in the way in which we deliver it. We also heard that there’s a disconnect between digital and print, with digital often regarded as less glamorous.

Vogue—and Condé Nast in general—was already creating one-off bespoke landing pages for special events but they weren't part of our DNA like they were for print, more of an afterthought, unlike our glossy counterpart. This was down to being too costly on resources, and timely to produce, but fundamentally, Editorial wasn’t fussed about “glossy” because it wasn’t aligned to their business needs.

Our objective here—under our pillar of Immersion—was to discover if there could be a correlation between immersive storytelling and sustainable engagement. We probed further to understand if any of our internal data could uncover some insight into user behaviour, especially around key moments throughout the year.

market-data.jpg

We discovered the US saw an increase of 344% in traffic during the 2019 Met Gala, the UK’s traffic rose by 147% when their Forces for Change issue dropped, and Italy had a surge of 97% when Karl Lagerfeld died. So our data was telling us that key moments were opportunities to improve engagement.

With that insight, we started prototyping and experimenting with external tools for further discovery and to measure and learn before productionizing for use at scale.

Cover-Prototype-01.png
Cover-Prototype-02.png
 

In an attempt to create those recurring moments, and those reasons for people to keep coming back, we developed the concept of Covers. A Cover is a take-over component that elevates a story when the need arises but removes all of the editorial and technical headaches of creating one-off experiences.



The component is designed using Condé Nast’s token-based design system, allowing every brand under its portfolio to use it. It handles all existing content and media, commercial inventory and multiple configurations for bundling articles as part of the experience.

Putting covers to the test

Our hypothesis, aligned to our product strategy, was that if we delivered a more immersive experience, we would increase engagement and overall consumption.

Based on this, we collaborated with UK editorial, to re-publish a set of stories, together with prototypes of our new component using 3rd party software to gather further insight.

We A/B tested our experiments, randomly splitting users between the original homepage and our concept. Each variant of the test saw an increase in dwell time with an average 12% increase in content consumption during a session.

One of our findings was that performance during a session was severely compromised. Tripling the page load, due to unused JavaScript and server requests coming from the tools we were using to create the experiences.

A key takeaway was that these tools weren’t scalable. This galvanized our approach in productionizing the component in our own CMS, for greater control and efficiency.

Through a moderated study to gain qualitative insight, Covers tested positively across a diverse demographic. Users were delighted but not overly surprised as they expected the homepage to always reflect a print cover when it’s released. The concept resonated with users because it felt “premium”, and “integrated” and aligns with Vogue’s personality. Unsurprisingly the print cover was regarded as one of Vogue’s main brand attributes.

Vogue-Rihanna.jpg
Vogue-Judi.jpg
Previous
Previous

BBC News

Next
Next

Kollektiv