HUFFPOST
Designing a user-friendly astrological experience for beginners and aficionados alike.
Team__
2 Product Leads, 6 Product Designers, 2 Internal Stakeholders (Sr. Product Manager, Product Designer)
Disciplines__
Visual Design, UX Design, UX Research
Tools__
Figma, Google Suite
Timeline__
Sep 2022 — Dec 2022
Context
The HuffPost Horoscopes page is underdesigned and underused.
HuffPost prides itself on its people-first platform and strives to cover topics and perspectives with sincerity and relatability. Like all digital newspapers, HuffPost is home to a number of subsections. Of them, HuffPost Life serves as a vibrant hub for news on wellness, food, style, relationships, and more – including HuffPost Horoscopes.
With this in mind, HuffPost challenged us with the following question:
How might we transform HuffPost's Horoscopes page into a visually compelling and user-centric platform?
Overview
The HuffPost Horoscopes page is underdesigned and underused.
HuffPost is a digital media platform offering comprehensive news coverage and engaging content to a diverse audience. However, some sections like the Horoscopes page, struggle with lackluster design and clunky navigation, which limits further engagement from users.
With my team at DiversaTech Consulting, I redesigned HuffPost Horoscopes from ground up with features that targeted its visual language, at-a-glance legibility, and content offerings.
Discovery
And so begins our research!
The primary goal of our research was to explore users' digital astrology experiences, analyze competitors, and identify pain points for actionable insights.
This (↘) is what the Horoscopes page looked like. First things first, what do our users think?
“Oh… um…”*
*Direct quote from our user research.
Uh-oh! That’s not very good.
To address the oh’s and um’s, our team conducted our research in a three-pronged approach:
01. Diary Studies
Uncover in-depth user behaviors, preferences, and experiences over time through self-reported entries.
03. User Surveys
Quantify user sentiments towards horoscope pages, identifying areas for improvement aligned with user priorities.
The research at this stage served to establish a working understanding of HuffPost Horoscope's
market share and user sentiments early on!
In this project, we conducted our research in two separate stages -- one preliminary wave of research,
and one usability-testing-centric one.
02. Competitive Analyses
Conduct SWOT analyses of competitors to determine what best in-class practices are necessary for market relevance.
Key Insights
Experiences are segmented by familiarity with horoscopes.
HuffPost hopes to capture their existing readership with the new Horoscopes page, but varying levels of zodiac literacy in this population are critical factors in a user’s experience with HuffPost Horoscopes.
Readers who weren’t familiar with astrology struggled with understanding the content and its jargon.
While these users don’t frequent the horoscope pages, they drop by on occasion to peruse their luck of the day. However, the interface is sparse in graphics but heavy in text, so low-familiarity readers are faced with a wall of information that also throws around words like “9th House of Voyaging” with minimal explanation or visual texture – that’s a recipe for cognitive overload.
What do you think about horoscopes?
"I believe they can be a good portal to feel understood or have a better
understanding of how the universes energy could be affecting your day to day life."
- Alex F. (User interview)
People seek community in credible, creative, and immersive spaces.
Competitors hold advantages in SEO by leveraging their consistent visual branding, offering compelling social elements, and/or providing comprehensive information on astrology.
In other words, users struggle with …
Can you explain why you might look at horoscopes?
"To know what people are talking about, to stay relevant with the college demographic.
To look up compatibility with my boyfriend and friends. It’s like celebrity news to me."
- M.E. Lee (User Interview)
Meanwhile, astrology-savvy readers navigated the content with ease, but found it minimally engaging.
High-familiarity readers consistently seek horoscopes as part of their routine or just as a habitual guide for self. These readers seek direction from their horoscopes – anything from interpersonal compatibility to personal happiness – and the existing Horoscopes page only offers broad forecasts for one’s daily, weekly, monthly, and (inexplicably) love horoscopes.
Let’s put that all together!
Guided by our findings, we began conceptualizing the fresh face of HuffPost Horoscopes.
🗝️ The key is the focus on the users! How can we make this experience engaging, entertaining, and easy to navigate?
Let’s outline some product requirements first.
✷ Our Product Parameters
Based on the insights and pain points above, our final product must have …
Prototyping
This is just one of many flows we experimented with for mid-fi prototypes!
In total, we fleshed out four different flows and tested them across users in interviews
to determine which offered the most intuitive experience.
These images capture the collaborative ideations of my whole team, not just my process :)
For a more detailed
glimpse into my design journey, feel free to reach out for a chat!
Ideation
After sketching out some ideas, my team and I moved onto our low-fidelity screens.
In order to embody the user experience, we conducted additional research at this step:
01. User Flows
Visualize user interaction pathways on the Horoscopes page to streamline navigation and improve engagement.
02. User Interviews
Collect qualitative insights by conducting guided usability tests with active HuffPost users.
The goal was, and always is, for the users to navigate intuitively from Point A to Point B. In this case, integration into HuffPost Life meant that we needed to experiment with visibility on the HuffPost Life landing page in order to seamlessly direct users to HuffPost Horoscopes (point B!).
In total, we fleshed out four different user flows and tested them across users in interviews to determine which offered the most intuitive experience.
Final solution
The future of HuffPost Horoscopes
Guiding you through your story.
Your horoscope front and center.
Collapsible sections to minimize visual overload.
Toggle between yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
Want to see other signs’ horoscopes? Just click the arrows.
And that’s right — we found a better place for the ads too.
A part of HuffPost Life.
Please welcome Horoscopes to the HuffPost Life, where it belongs. Horoscopes is no longer a floating link in the sidebar — instead, it is situated among all other Life products.
Let’s take it a step further.
Astrology is now a page of its own, with the same design language as all other Life subpages. Here, you can navigate the many astrology articles already in the HuffPost archive.
Brief intermission!
A picture worth a thousand words.
Notice something? It’s hard to miss the fresh, funky, and functional graphics filling your screen.
Each page is designed to keep you immersed in both the astrological experience and the HuffPost ecosystem as a whole.
Brew a cup of tea, settle down, and take a deep breath — it’s horoscopes time, baby!
Hey there! Those icons up there were my babies in this project :) Let me lead you through the evolution of these icons!
First, I set about exploring stylistic options from both competitors' offerings and our brand's existing design language.
After sketching numerous iterations for each zodiac sign and incorporating feedback from my team, I finalized the designs using Adobe Illustrator.
Throughout the whole process, I made sure my design language stayed consistent: bold colors, sharp contrasts, and just the right amount of abstract detailing.
The result? A cohesive set of designs that stand out with sharp contrast and saturation, perfectly aligned with HuffPost's brand identity <3
Now back to our regularly scheduled programming…
Learn while you look.
With three new educational pages, learning about astrology has never been so easy. Mars retrograde, who?
Containing both introductory and intermediary levels of information, HuffPost Horoscopes is the place for everyone.
Reflections
What a ride!
As my very first step in UI/UX, I definitely came out of this project with many stories — successes, setbacks, and shortcomings galore. I was fortunate enough to be a part of a team of incredibly talented individuals, all of whom contributed bits and pieces to my approach to design today.
Engaging with real HuffPost users, conducting interviews, and drawing insights was a uniquely gratifying experience — it’s not every day that I can directly connect with the community I’m striving to make impact for. The HuffPost team has since adjusted and implemented our team’s recommendations on the HuffPost Horoscopes page (now live!) — seeing that our research and ideation culminated in direct change for both our client and their users was also incredibly fulfilling
Many thanks to my team at DiversaTech for this experience, my PMs Michelle and Geena for their guidance, and Kelly Hanshaw and Matt Sullivan for their support!