Sana Shah
DESIGN WITH PURPOSE
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Gift Guide

 

THE GIFT GUIDE

ROLE
User Experience Designer, Washingtonian Magazine

CONTRIBUTIONS 
User Experience Design

MEDIUM
Desktop | Mobile

TIMELINE
Nov 2020-Dec 2020

THE TEAM
UX Designer, Web Developer, Director of Digital Products, Web Producer, Executive Editor, Asst. Editor, Editor in Chief

THE PROBLEM

Every year Washingtonian compiles a Gift Guide around the holidays in the print magazine to give readers suggestions on what to buy for loved ones. The digital rollout for the Gift Guide in past years was always consistently slow due to the large amount of items and our Editor in Chief described the page as stale. He mentioned that he wanted an annual online version of the Gift Guide that could be used in subsequent years.

ScALING WHAT WE ALREADY HAD

Since we wanted to get the Gift Guide out quickly in time for the holidays we had to be creative with our solution. We ended up going back to one of our old feature packages: Scenes from the Quarantine. This package in addition to our Women in Washington package used a custom developed JSON data structure to hold all of the information including photos, text, and social media links. It was developed by me and the Web team’s developer in 2019 and had been reused and scaled for a few feature packages. The tile view can be seen below for the Scenes from Quarantine package.

MODIFICATIONS TO THE EXISTING PLATFORM

What we ended up doing was taking away the modal feature since that was primarily for tile items with large pieces of editorial content as seen below.

I also took inspiration from NY Magazine’s Strategist gift guide for how they made price transparency a priority when users would view an item (note how the price is listed in two different places, we ended up not doing this in our final version of the guide but I thought it was interesting how they highlighted that).


THE LAUNCH

Once we had decided how we were going to structure the Gift Guide package we were able to go ahead and launch with the tile design and buy button. The guide included categories from the print magazine for the type of gifts readers might buy.


REFLECTION + TAKEAWAYS

Using what we have can be better than making something from scratch. We were able to leverage the JSON data structure from our Women in Washington and Scenes from Quarantine packages to create the Gift Guide with some adjustments. This saved us a lot of time over building a new platform to host the data from scratch.

THE IMPACT

  1. Scaling an existing product. Using our JSON data structure saved us a lot of time which gave us the ability to turn around on the launch only a few weeks after the print magazine went on shelves.

  2. Accessibility meant better service journalism. Giving the price of each gift item and a link to buy each item in the tile was accessible to readers (which is what service journalism’s intention is) and also gave us a lot of direct engagement on our site that month.