Seven Years at Gannett! An Overview
It’s rare to be in-house for as long as I have, so I wanted to share a bit about the arc that I’ve experienced in my time with Gannett.
In the early days, I focused on standalone app and feature work, which trained me up from a graphic designer to a product designer, and helped me discover a love of designing systems at scale – an interest I had no idea I had when I joined as an intern during my first year of grad school. Since 2016, my focus has shifted to design systems and design ops. I’ve been deeply involved in two enterprise redesigns, and also taken some unexpected detours into workflow design. My hope is that sharing the little history below will add some context around the UX projects on this site.
Desk photo I took summer 2019 to mark the moment of the new USA TODAY article launching to 1% of traffic.
Early Days – App Design
When I arrived at Gannett in 2013, our design team’s main goal was for all of our papers to have a presence on the web, and in the app stores. The ad map was uncomplicated, our paywalls didn’t exist yet, and designers rarely spoke of revenue or subscriber numbers or editorial workflow. Our job was simply to deliver the news in digital form as cleanly and beautifully as possible. Meanwhile, we got to work on new products for niche audiences – apps for travel content, for sharing photos, for finding events in your neighborhood.
It was a simpler, “golden age” sort of time, and I spent my first couple years working on a mix of core and niche products, learning an incredible amount from the other designers on my team and from the sheer variety and scale of work I was given the chance to tackle. Some favorite projects included:
An app for college campuses integrating college newspaper content with USA TODAY’s daily headlines. This was a crash course in designing a basic content experience, events calendar and some light social interaction. Miraculously, it went live to forty campuses, including University of Wisconsin and Villanova. It was my first time shipping a product that strangers used, and it felt like magic!
University of North Texas’s version of “The Buzz.” This was a collaboration with lead designer Margaret Haag.
A broadcast news app for Gannett’s (former) TV stations, including content, weather and traffic experiences. In this project I discovered my love of what we call VQA (“visual quality assurance”) – working closely with dev to get the live app to look just right. I also got a taste for maintaining an icon library, and thinking about how an experience shifts across different use cases: how does what a user wants to see in a weather forecast change across a sunny day vs. rainy day vs. impending blizzard?
Broadcast app redesign 2014. Top row shows how the home page changes across regular, inconvenient and severe weather. This was a collaboration with lead designer Christopher Houston and information architects Brian Price and Shayli Jimenez.
One of the first Windows 10 apps ever! Microsoft invited USA TODAY to be a launch partner, and I got the amazing experience of being the sole designer on a team with two devs, trying to crack the code of how to get a news app to look beautiful on any screen size, from the smallest phone all the way up to Xbox (and eventually on Hololens!). This was my first time truly setting up a system from scratch, and thinking through how a design might scale across a wide range of sizes, and I was hooked.
Windows10-themed cake alongside the tablet version of the app soon after it launched in 2015.
Design System Seeds
During this time I also worked on a number of smaller feature projects related to our core news sites, and in the course of those I started to question our comfort with so much variation in look and feel across them. Two particular projects were eye-opening for me about the opportunity we had, at our scale, for setting up some design systems:
I was assigned the task of adding a persistent ad to our galleries to help them monetize better. As I poked around our site to find the gallery in question, I discovered that we had not one but six different galleries! A different experience on home, section front, article, longform article, standalone gallery, and topic pages. To add the desired ad in, we had to go into six different designs, and six different branches of code!
The beginnings of the USA TODAY NETWORK involved pulling all local papers onto a common CMS and core web and app experiences. One task that came with this was cutting out logo assets for each market. In the process, I realized that our handling of tiny details like the specific shade of the logo, the application of texture, the angle of the drop shadow – were all just slightly different. We had to export 100 of these logos each at 15 different sizes to hit all the places they needed to go. Doing this, the scale of our network clicked for me. Any product decision we made – even something as tiny as the angle of the drop shadow on a logo – would get multiplied 100 times! The stakes were high to get things right at the source.
The reach of the USA TODAY Network in mid-2019.
Design Systems & More
For me, the shift from feature and niche app design to design systems came in 2016. I heard that a redesign was coming, and I knew I wanted to be on the front lines to help tie our experiences together and make it easier to deliver quality products and iterate on them. I wanted to help us make smart design decisions at the source, so that when they got multiplied 100 times, we would feel good about it.
In the past three years, my main focus has been on two major enterprise redesigns: the first in 2016, the second in 2019 and still continuing. These redesigns are of a large scale and involve hundreds of other people, each touching their own part, but my role in both has been to pull together the parts into a cohesive whole that we can maintain and iterate on over time – and to get others on board with that mission. Occasionally, I will also take the lead on a larger feature project.
Design Ops & Workflow Design
At the same time that my focus has changed, our design team’s goals have also changed. Now we don’t just have to show up – we have to show up in much more sophisticated ways. We need to look our best on all screen sizes and across many more touch-points. Our ad map has to work harder for us than ever. We need to give readers a reason to come to us, and a reason to stay when they do, and a reason to want to pay for that privilege. We need to validate our design decisions with testing, not just our own sense of what looks good or what we think people might like. It’s truly a different time than when I first joined the team!
One big learning from witnessing and participating in such a time of change within such a large organization is that making the switch to a more sophisticated product means we have to work differently. When all we needed was separate sites to be stood up, the stakes were lower for different teams to talk to each other and understand how systems work. But all of a sudden, when the consumer marketing team’s subscription messages need to coexist with the audience engagement team’s “one more click” feature, and both need to do no harm to advertising revenue or site speed while also giving readers what they actually came to us for – the story – people on different teams need to talk to each other.
Post-migration, design files are now organized and named consistently!
So, some additional projects I’ve found myself deep-diving into have veered more into the realms of workflow and operations. These efforts have been about designing how many teams can work together better, ultimately in service of delivering a better experience to customers. Projects have included a cleanup of Confluence, the creation of documentation standards, a migration/re-architecting of six years’ worth of design files. A year later, it’s exciting to see that these practices – documenting our work in Confluence, writing Problem Briefs when we kick off projects, saving our files in shared drives – have simply become “how it’s done.”
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And that’s my attempt to summarize what I’ve been up to in my more-than-most years with Gannett. Every year has been different and surprising, challenging me in new ways and leading me to discover interests I never knew I had (re-architecting Confluence definitely being at the top of that list!). While change is not always easy, I am so grateful for the incredible learning opportunities that have come with the privilege of working at Gannett during this time of transformation.
Deeper dives into a subset of the projects named above can be found here.