Technology Publishing Platform

The challenge

The platform needed a clearer structure for frequent technology content across multiple categories, so readers could scan new stories, understand what was important, and move from browsing into article reading more easily.

Because the platform attracted a technology-focused audience, advertisers were interested in premium placements that could give their campaigns strong visibility. The publisher also needed clear, sellable inventory that the sales team could offer confidently.

The core challenge was to create a page structure where editorial content remained easy to browse and read, while inventory was planned clearly enough to support the publisher's commercial model.

My role and responsibilities

This was a collaborative client project at MediaMint involving design, development, sales, and leadership stakeholders. My background in Ad Operations helped me understand the commercial context behind the redesign, especially how publishers plan inventory and why placement visibility matters.

As part of the design team, I contributed to restructuring the existing publishing experience across content organisation, article layouts, responsive behaviour, advertising placements, and test variations.

• Review: Reviewed existing publishing layouts, content structures, and advertising placement patterns.
• Design: Contributed to homepage, category, and article layouts that supported both editorial and advertising requirements.
• Collaboration: Worked with the wider team through design handoff and implementation support.
• Optimisation: Created design variations for A/B testing and reviewed performance with the wider team to help inform further design decisions.

Understanding the existing experience

The website already had an established content structure, category navigation, and advertising model. The redesign was not about starting from scratch; it was about improving how the existing experience organised stories, supported article reading, and made advertising placements more intentional.

Balancing user and business needs

How might we make advertising valuable for advertisers and the publisher, while keeping the content experience clear and readable for users?

Design direction

Structuring the article experience

When users selected a story from the homepage or a category page, the article page needed to shift from discovery to focused reading.

The structure had to support the article headline, metadata, hero or media area, reading column, standard ad placements, and a related stories grid at the bottom, while keeping the selected story as the main focus.

Homepage advertising between categories

The homepage needed to support both premium and standard inventory. A high-impact ad appeared at the top of the desktop experience, while standard leaderboard placements appeared between category sections as users scrolled.

This created visible inventory for advertisers while keeping category browsing predictable for readers.

Creating a high-impact advertising experience

Premium campaigns required a prominent placement that could support large brand activity. One approach the team explored was a high-impact desktop format at the top of the experience.

We explored this approach because the top of the page created immediate exposure for premium inventory, while still allowing the article content to regain space once users began scrolling.

The expanded format was designed to make the campaign noticeable when users entered the page. As users scrolled, the placement collapsed into a more compact state, maintaining campaign presence while returning more vertical space to the article.

This behaviour was designed for desktop. On mobile, the layout used responsive page structures with smaller ad formats such as 320 x 50 leaderboards.

Testing advertising approaches

Because campaign presence could be handled in more than one way, we created two design variations and tested them as part of the optimisation process. The aim was to compare different approaches while considering the reader's experience.

The review considered commercial and engagement signals such as ad viewability, click-through rate, and scroll behaviour through the article. These inputs helped the team evaluate whether the advertising treatment supported campaign visibility without unnecessarily disrupting the reading experience.

I contributed to creating the two design variations and reviewing their performance with the wider team. The comparison gave us another input for evaluating how different advertising treatments could support commercial goals while preserving the article experience.

The solution

The redesign brought editorial content, responsive layouts, and commercial placements into a clearer structure that supported both reader needs and publisher requirements.

The final experience

The final direction created a publishing experience where editorial structure and commercial requirements were planned together.

Impact and reflection

This project was an important part of my transition from Ad Operations into UX-focused work. My previous experience gave me practical context around publisher revenue models, advertising inventory, performance and why placement and visibility matter.

Working on the redesign allowed me to approach those requirements from a UX perspective, considering how content hierarchy, responsive behaviour, advertising and the reading experience needed to work together.

Creating and testing alternative advertising treatments also reinforced the value of using performance data alongside design thinking when making decisions in a commercial publishing environment.

One of my key learnings was that good UX does not always mean removing commercial elements from an interface. In a publishing product, advertising is part of the ecosystem. The challenge is to integrate it intentionally so user needs and business requirements can coexist.