Kinja was the publishing platform powering sites like Gizmodo, The Onion, Jezebel, Kotaku, The A.V. Club and more. Together these brands reached around 100 million unique readers a month.
In 2019 I was part of the team of 4 designers rethinking navigation on the Kinja platform, where readers kept getting lost between sites and sections. Through two rounds of prototyping and moderated user testing, task success rose from 60% to 94.4%, and the navigation that shipped measurably improved engagement across the whole network.
Readers couldn't tell where they were
Kinja had many page types, sections & story formats with independent navigation components. Notice how navigation collapses on the example above: the section menu disappears, the logo changes and now links to the Muse front page. There's no obvious way to get back to the Jezebel front page. This was the main problem.
The team came up with 2 additional goal statements, so the final goals were:
- Increase engagement by allowing readers to explore content across front pages, sections, and article pages with confidence.
- Expand site brand voices while maintaining simplicity of a consistent navigation UI.
- Network effect: introduce users to sites across the network through a clear navigation structure.
To get a better idea of the key jobs to be done, the team mapped them for three personas.
| As a reader I want to … using the kinja nav. | Votes |
|---|---|
| know where I am | 21 |
| go back to the front page, find more content | 21 |
| quickly go to a section of the site I like (topic/tag/author/format/etc.) | 18 |
| find out what this site is about | 17 |
| access profile functions: posts/comments I wrote/saved, change my pic | 16 |
| know when someone replies to a comment I made | 14 |
| find a specific post I read earlier | 10 |
| log out, because I'm either on a shared computer, or I have multiple accounts | 8 |
| As an author I want to … using the kinja nav. | Votes |
| write a new post | 17 |
| resume writing a post | 17 |
| find and manage posts others wrote | 12 |
| know if someone comments on my post | 12 |
| As an advertiser I want to … using the kinja nav. | Votes |
| check on my sponsored site | 14 |
| check on my sponsored section | 13 |
| check on my sponsored post | 13 |
Three concepts, six prototypes
After sketching there was enough disagreement to user-test 3 concepts against each other and let the evidence pick the winner.
2 factors that made this situation unique:
- With a 50–50 reader mobile-desktop split, every concept had to be designed and tested twice, once for each form factor.
- This was the first project at Kinja to rely heavily on qualitative user testing, so the research foundations — guidelines, screeners, scoring — had to be built from scratch.