Redesigning India's 5th Largest Startup Media Website

Entrackr is a new age media platform for entrepreneurs, startups and technology enthusiasts. They cover technology startups and breaking developments around them with incisive analysis and deep insights on daily basis.

Entrackr team wanted to launch new features of snippets and events in their website and reached out to me to help them redesign the website to improve its look and feel and add the two new features.

Project Overview

• Redesigned the Website to improve readability and engagement
• Completed redesign in 10 days following multiple design sprints and launched the facelift in 30 days
• Worked with the Wordpress dev team

My Responsibility

• User Research (Qualitative)
• Discussion with Stakeholders
• UI Design + Iterations
• Co-ordination with the development team (Wordpress)
• Usability Testing

Initial Problem

I was asked to improve the overall look and feel of the site, design as mobile-first and add two new features, Snippets & Events.

Snippets: A 60 words glimpse of the news, similar to Inshorts.Events: Entrackr wanted to start their own event's platform for startup enthusiasts, founders & VC's.

Discovery

The initial problem statement did not gave me enough clarity on why they wanted a new look and feel so i had a white board session with the stakeholders to understand 

Why they think the look and feel is not good?What do they perceive as good? and why?

We brainstormed on these questions and found the root problems that were bothering the stakeholders

• Low user retention, high bounce rates, thats why they planned to launch Snippets.
• No control over the google ads on their website, they wanted to increase their revenue but also make sure it doesn't hamper the readability or overall image of Entrackr.
• They wanted a custom website as too many plugins and Wordpress theme was making their website slow.

Finding the user challenges & needs

This part was easy, as i was a user itself so a lot of understanding came from my needs from a news website and many decisions were made by researching through news sites, blogs, case studies, talking to friends and stakeholders who were active users of a news site.

• Multiple ads compromise the readability.
• Most of the news sites are too confusing, multiple columns with different categories overwhelms the users.
• They value the authors and often like to read articles of a specific author.
• Prefer sites with images over text based websites.

Tearing down the current design and finding the solutions

Once i was clear with the business goals and user needs, i started tearing down the current design to know what's working and what's not.

Problem > Brief > Solution

P: One featured image being used for slider, thumbnail and blog header negatively impacting the usability and appeal of the site.

B: It's a necessity for any news site to load fast, hence the team cannot upload high resolution images. One single image was not able to fit different aspect ratio, hence many times important things were cropped. Slider and the blog header always had blur images due to fullscreen width

S: One fixed Aspect ratio of image to be used everywhere and no fullscreen images

P: Text Overlap on images always create the problem

B: Readability was compromised due to overlapping design, sometimes image background created issue and sometimes the value of image was sacrifised.

S: Non Overlapping design, give equal importance to text and the image

P: Missing author descriptions

B: People want to know who has written the article and like to read more articles by the writer. This was missing in the entrackr design.

S: Highlighting the author, a small brief about them and a way to contact them

Evangelising Snippets

Snippets are 60 words short glimpse of the news, since this whole concept was taken from Inshorts i took my inspirations from Inshorts itself to design a web experience for the short stories, that are easier to read and users can quickly move to the next story.

Inshorts used thumb gestures for actions, but since web browsers don't support gestures, i designed a layout that is easy for users to change the snippets quickly, while being able to save or share them.

Implementing Events

Events section in itself is a very complex system that involves event creation, management, search, ticketing and payment processes. Due to short deadline and technical limitations we chose to use a 3rd party event plugin for this.

Final facelift of ENTRACKR

After 10 days of agile design sprints i handed off the design to the development team, worked along with the developers to have to proper implementation, many design elements were changes during the development process due to technical limitations. 

After 1 month, the website went live. This is was one the most time-efficient projects i did and received wonderful feedback from the ENTRACKR team.

Here is a link to the Entrackr Website

My Learnings

Due to time crunch, we had to do agile design sprints and discussions, we made various sacrifices due to technical limitations of wordpress. Learn how to handle pressure, Limitations with Wordpress builders and find solutions together with the technical team towards a common goal.

People who i am thankful to

I am very proud that i got an opportunity to work with Entrackr and I thank Mr. Jai Vardhan (Cofounder & CEO) and Mr. Jitendra Singh (Cofounder) for their constant guidance and support. I also would thank to Mr. Prateek Singh (CEO@Roundigital) and Mr. Raunak Hajela (CTO@Whatastory), for being there and helping me at every step.

Thanks,

Akshat Srivastava