Aol.
Aol News. Site Redesign
Just prior to the purchase of Huffington Post Aol News was set for a full-scale redesign. The decision a year prior to shift the balance from aggregation to original content was proving successful across all metrics and now we needed a site design to support this transformation. The existing UI just wasn't built for hierarchy among features, and day-to-day stories and essentially left no space to build awareness for the impressive roster of journalists. It felt far too robotic for the high-level of human effort going into it.
Through several iterations we developed a UI and design that conveyed the sense of a very dynamic, responsive and very human news organization. The core idea was a fluid UI built on a fluid CMS platform that would listen and adapt to the news rather than forcing the unpredictable news into a rigid, preset template. To accomplish this we developed several UI and design recommendations for a wide-range of news events and varying degrees of news volume for a day. But ultimately we just gave the editorial team more tools and control over their site. They know more than anyone the shifting news priorities of any day and they needed a design that could be just as adaptive and spontaneous as they are to covering the news.