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PROJECT
Creating an informational investing hub for millennial readers.
TLDR
Morning Brew started a news source for young adults as they have grown they wanted to expand their offering and asked me to design an Investing Hub for their platform​.
ROLE
UI Designer
Getting Started
Researching Competitors
Starting the process I wanted to dig in to what constitutes a great investing hub. I did competitive analysis of other investing websites to figure out what was working and what wasn't working. This research can be viewed here.
Sketches & Wireframes
Features
Personalization & Customization
Website personalization and customization have become key aspects of user experience design. Simply providing a product isn't sufficient anymore; allowing users to tailor the interface to their needs is crucial. To facilitate this, I introduced the "Topics You Follow" tag option. Users can select tags aligning with their interests, and the "For You" content sidebar dynamically adjusts to cater to their preferences.
Read Time
Adding "Read Time" along with the Author Name and Date is a valuable addition to our website. This feature displays the average read time of articles, which has been proven to boost engagement. Marketing Land reported that incorporating estimated reading times increased overall time on site by 13.8% for a front-end engineer. Moreover, it led to a 66.7% increase in followers, subscribers, and article shares. Given our audience's preference for digestible content and the positive impact of read time on engagement, it's a must-have feature.
Ads
To ensure a pleasant user experience while incorporating necessary ads, I opted for a Native Ads pattern. Native ads blend seamlessly with editorial content but are sponsored by advertisers. They outperform Display/Banner ads significantly:
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Consumers view native ads 53% more often.
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They generate an 18% higher lift in purchase intent and a 9% lift in brand affinity compared to banner ads.
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In-feed native ad placements attract 25% more attention than display ad units.
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Moreover, native ads help mitigate ad fatigue, where users lose interest due to repetitive ads.
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To implement this, I introduced card patterns throughout the website, differentiated from actual content by an icon and the sponsor's name instead of the author/article/read time.
Regular Post
With Ad
Bottom Line
Inspired by Bruce Lee's philosophy of adaptation, I crafted a design that embodies clarity, digestibility, and wit, echoing Morning Brew's mission. In a competitive landscape, the design not only had to be clean but also emotionally and aesthetically appealing. I aimed for simplicity, immediate user engagement, and personalization options to strike this balance effectively.
Iteration 1
Iteration 2
Fast Follow & Notes
One thing I want to note is that you will see I didn't build out the menu bar or footer - I thought my time would be better spent working on elements that don't exist currently.
Based on the time frame I didn't get to build out all of the pages and features that I would have liked to so I wanted to put a couple notes about what those would be.
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"For You" page - this page would house things like
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The ability to customize which sections they follow by customizing their tags
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The ability to view all of the articles that are relevant to them based on their tag selection
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The ability to customize what shows on the stock ticker
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The ability to see all of their saved articles
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"Market Data" page
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This would be accessed by clicking "View Market Data" on the stock ticker.
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It would be a data - centric page showing articles and information about the stock market daily.
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Save feature
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This can be seen on the individual article page but I would like to build it out so the user could quickly save articles and access them later for reading.​
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Secondary menu w/categories
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This would live below the main in-depth article and above the page content. ​
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It would have the categories and nested sub-categories in it to further refine content.
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Search Feature