Politiken.dk
With the objective to design a more alive, expressive and hand-held online news experience, we set out to redesign one of Denmarks largests online news papers. It’s been a huge and complex but incredibly rewarding process, learning the online news business the hard way: trying to change it!
In the fall 2008, I helped the internal online staff at Politiken, redesign the online newspaper pollitiken.dk. Politiken.dk is not only one of most visited online news papers in Denmark, it’s one of the most visited sites at all, having more than 9 mil. visits pr. month.
The design needed a major overhaul to match the recent redesign of the paper version and to accommodate the new possibilities on the web. Now, about a year after we started the process, the site is alive and kicking.
Overall, the objective of the project was to design a more alive, visual and expressive online news experience, doing away with endless database generated feeds of news.
My role in the project have included having workshops with different internal stakeholders, doing design prototyping, concept development, style sketching and designing the major page templates and “content bricks” for this huge, complex and highly modular design system.
Throughout the process I worked closely together with Politikens in-house designer Frederik Storm, who also played an essential part in the paper redesign process. After the initial design process, which lasted for about 3 month, Politikens staff took over, finishing the design and leading the development process.
Note: The images above are my sketches from the design process. The final site will not necessarily look exactly like this.
Here are some of the objectives that we worked with during the redesign
- A clear and consistent top navigation
- A more spacious design, with increased contrast in sizes and color.
- A general visual alignment with the paper version, inheriting i.e. a large serif font for headlines and other typographical treatments, ornaments and icons.
- Use of larger images. Both to accommodate new larger screen resolutions and to utilize the great photographers and photo archive at Politiken.
- Making the front page more of a overview page than a content page, removing i.e. the intro texts to get the users to click on to the actual articles.
- Introducing “islands” of content – color coded sections along the front page – grouping content and ads in themes and areas of interest
- Generally making the front page (and section front-pages) more hand-held/alive, allowing stories to take a number of different appearances according to importance or the type of content. Thereby giving the editors the ability to change the layout of the front page and the story teasers as the day/story progresses.
- Giving the article pages more focus, space and finesse. Designing a usable and consistent set of tools for the articles (i.e. fact boxes, info boxes, image galleries, time lines, link boxes, side stories).
- Enabling articles to have different appearances according to type of content and importance.
