About
The Axios team sought a strategy to increase their readership. From landing pages to core features, they wanted a designer embedded in their product team that could ideate and execute.
Axios had in-house qualitative user research and an impressive online analytics cache. After helping synthesize the research, I identified the critical issue: Users often shifted between different information gathering mindsets during their visit, and Axios only catered to one.
In fact, over 60% of users asked for longer content and coverage of niche topics, adjacent to stories they were reading.
Despite difficulty navigating the site, readers felt a strong brand loyalty to Axios' authors. In the words of one respondent:
“The newsletters are f*cking brilliant — smart, tight, knowing, a little funny. Like that really smart person on your shoulder every day.”
Getting an Axios AM email in the morning empowered readers with access to the latest news, creating a perceived advantage in their work environments.
The challenge: Capitalize on empowerment and re-engage readers in divergent mindsets.
On mobile, we had a better chance of capturing a user's attention by increasing the density of available stories, much like Google News, Twitter, or Reddit. Horizontally scrolling sections would add variety and encourage exploration. This was a promising solution, but there was not enough development bandwidth to implement this in the current site version.
Take a deep dive
A marquée Axios newsletter gained traction after the editorial team focused on lengthier reporting. Calling this the 'Axios Deep Dive', we explored a north star vision of an immersive mobile storytelling experience.
I developed an interactive prototype that visualized several microinteractions, elevating the storytelling abilities of the Axios editorial team.