Bringing a content hub up to modern standards
Char-Broil had set out to elevate their brand’s perception in the market, and this meant a re-vamp of every consumer-facing touchpoint.
Over 10 years, their content hub, the Char-Broil Community, amassed thousands of blog posts covering dozens of subjects. But the hub was overflowing. Content was getting hard to find. And it wasn’t clear which pieces of content were impacting the business.
My Role
As UX Lead, I lead an internal team of designers and developers as we redesigned and rebuilt the entire Char-Broil Community experience, while also working closely with our content team as we developed a new content strategy.
First, content. Then architecture
Using our findings from a massive content audit, we recategorized the top 500 most popular pieces of content.
A new top-level navigation emerged as categories and sub-categories were discussed, debated, and iterated.
Post-level UX
I was in charge of designing a blog UI for the modern responsive web. With this in mind, I UX-audited several popular blogs and news sites to get a feel for expected mobile and desktop interaction patterns.
My high-fidelity wireframes were the blueprint for design and development.
To ensure the sidebar served up relevant related content, I worked with our development team to create a sorting algorithm that matched content based on tags, and prioritized them in the UI using Google Analytics page view data.
To enable this, we had to develop a consistent tagging strategy and re-tag every post appropriately. It was worth the effort, the sidebar works great!
I also designed a customizable product module to call attention to products featured in the posts. This module directly connected their content to their e-commerce store where a user could purchase it online.
Community front page
The front page of the community went through several iterations before we landed on a content-rich responsive grid designed to feature up to five pieces of content.
The results
Almost immediately we saw increased engagement with the content, as time on site drastically increased and pages per session rose enough to indicate that related content was encouraging browsing.
After a month we were seeing an increase in traffic, particularly from mobile as sessions tripled!
Looking for a great recipe to throw on the grill? Check out the Community for yourself!