PLAY

A one-stop shop for all our puzzles, games, comics, and horoscopes pages in a unified and updated brand. 

My role: Design manager, UI designer, researcher
I serve as the liaison between Product, Business, and Dev teams. I manage PLAY research and design various pages including the subscription offer page, post-game play screen, and mobile navigation enhancements.

What we did:

  • Created a new Hub:  A configurable landing page to highlight content from across the PLAY network all in one place.

  • Updated and enhanced existing pages: Crosswords, Sudoku, Quick Cross and more, supporting stats (for registered users) and archive access, ad-free experience (for subscribers), as well as links to our partner games driving engagement and revenue.

  • Revamped the comics experience:  Showcasing comics and allowing subscribers full access to previous day’s comics

  • Set the stage for future enhancements to horoscopes: Newly redesigned pages featuring daily and monthly horoscopes that will allow new features and content to be added soon.

Next Steps: 
There will be a fast follow for quizzes and two additional games as well as comics and horoscopes improvements. We are listening to user feedback and iterating as patterns emerge. 

KPIs we measure:

  • Daily Active Users (DAU) / Monthly Active Users (MAU)

  • Session Length

  • Pages per Session

  • Day 1 / Day 7 / Day 30 Retention

  • Number of registered users and subscribers over time

Lead UI designers: Mike Dawson, Ben Verlinde
Branding: Gannett Brand Marketing
Product managers: Pete Ferrara, Nate Pringle

  • Screenshot of a subscription offer page

    Subscription offer page

    To avoid a heavy dev lift, we adapted the current offer page with the new PLAY UI. With UI assistance from B. Verlinde.

  • screenshot of a post game screen for non-subscribers

    Post-game play screen

    There were three states for this page: Anonymous, registered, and subscribed. Each drove engagement or optimized revenue for that particular user. With UI assistance from B. Verlinde.

  • Screenshot of a subscription roadblock

    Comics roadblock

    Anonymous comics user are allowed to see the daily comic only — registered users and subscribers see a roadblock encouraging them to subscribe to see the full archive, along with all access to all of PLAY.

home
Next project