‘ЭГ’ website redesign
Ultralab team was looking for a designer and offered a test task of redesigning the main page of “Экономическа газета”. I drafted my design with explanatory remarks about business and user problem-solving.
See the mockup and comments in Figma RU 🇷🇺
Smart economy
I don’t have any contacts within “ЭГ”, which is why I did a bit of research on-site. I suspected, that the newspaper had sparse funding in design department and more so inappropriately distributed.
Primarily, my attention was drawn to visual noise overload on the main page: pictures, banners, buttons of all sorts — everything in shambles. As a result user does not focus on anything, and business wastes resources on needless decorations: covers for articles, advertising banners, countless categories and highlighted materials.
My solution included getting rid of visual noise and distractions, dropping most illustrations for News category — so there is no need to purchase stock photos. I made layout simple and elegant using standard bootstrap, which also made adding new materials very easy. Both text and logo were updated using beautiful (and FFCU) Monseratt type.
All suggested change would benefit users as well. On-screen navigation and hierarchy are now intuitively clear. Article highlights and overall layout are similar to any modern news site which made “ЭГ” user-friendlier. New font looks well on most screens.
Categories
New layout became much more compact, in fact, everything on old main page fit in only a couple of screens. I decided to add more articles from categorized materials to main page so that every user could find something interesting.
Subscription
The most useful materials in “Экономическая газета” are locked and only available for subscription. In the old version this whole block was at the very bottom of the main page, and subscription information was nowhere to be found.
I decided to highlight it in order to raise conversion for business. Fading in on subscription articles also introduces premium content for the users so they know what they are paying for.
