Business Insider (2015-2023)
Journey to become the most beloved digital publisher in the world
Role: Lead Designer
Key Challenges: To create stronger brand relevancy and respect in the market, build more loyalty with their audience, and to provide better advertising partnerships.
What I did: Starting in 2015 as the first Product Designer and eventually Design Director at Business Insider, I built and led their award-winning UXD team (of 10 designers) and helped to make the company an amazing place to work. I also led the brand strategy, user testing, and design for Buseinss Insider’s successful brand identity and digital user experience for their app, website, and all digital touch points.
Our evergreen goal at the organization was to become “The most beloved digital publisher in the world”. We never took this lightly, and I used it as fuel to form our decision making no matter the challenge.
When I took the role, I was not interested in maintaining the status quo for the brand or it’s experience. I wanted to break it out of the past and into the future in the most timeless and scalable way possible. I never let go of that dream and continued to push forward with it in every area of the product that I could. I believe this was infectious for my team and the organization. It helped to take the experience to the next level for our users, our editorial staff, and our business.
Below are some highlights over my 8 years with the organization which include the site redesign and rebrand of Business Insider, the mobile app redesign, the introduction of the subscription model, the redesign and rebrand of Business Insider’s WYSIWYG CMS platform (Muse), and the many awards achieved along the way including the Digiday award for Best Overall Site Design for Business Insider.
I had not planned to stay with the organization for nearly 8 years, but the opportunities for growth and improvement never stopped coming. One of the benefits of such a great work culture.
The rebrand.
I led all creative direction, process, and design for Business Insider’s logo evolution.
The site redesign and evolution.
I owned all initial vision, process, design, and creative direction for Business Insider’s mobile and desktop redesign. Eventually distributing new feature responsibilities out to the team as it grew. Our efforts successfully brought the digital product in to the present, and future-proofed the product for it’s successful evolution.
The Digiday award for best overall digital publishing site design.
I accepted the award at Digiday’s ceremony shortly after the launch of Business Insider’s rebrand and site redesign.
A new design system.
Role: Lead Designer
Key Challenges: To create centralized location and library for the team to boost workflow efficiency, scale, and consistency for the design and development teams. The transition from Sketch to Figma made this process much easier than it was in the past.
What I did: I led the creation of our new design system based on our rebrand and redesign efforts. Our UXD team continued to maintain and evolve they system as our feature set and company needs grew.
The app redesign.
Role: Lead Designer
Key Challenges: Improve time spent on app, provide stronger personalization parity between the web and app experience, boost time spent on app, increase subscriptions.
What I did: In collaboration with our friends at Metalab, I led the creative vision, user experience, and design for Business Insider’s iOS and Android app redesign, helping the app boost to 4x engagement after launch.
We created new team guidelines, culture expectations, and workflows that really worked.
The new workflows and standards that I helped to lead and develop with our Product and Engineering teams for the web and mobile app redesigns, helped define a new way of working for our groups that had not been experienced until that point. Process that is successfully still flowing to this day.
Photo: Business Insider tech team members (talent), Hollis Johnson (photographer for Business Insider), and myself (creative direction).
A new publishing tool design.
Role: Lead Designer
Key Challenges: More efficient workflow and collaboration tools were needed between on site and remote authors. The current system had become burdened by legacy code and design. The team was in need of more efficient and modern tools to allow them to create more accurate visions of the stories they wanted to tell on the site and app.
What I did: I led all brand, user testing, and user interface design for the newly developed app, Muse, a fully modular and customizable CMS (content management system), from scratch with our in-house design and development teams. Over 500 editors use Muse to publish content to the Insider app and website every day, enabling them to tell stories more accurately and effectively than ever before to their audience. Adoption of the app was to the delight of the editorial staff and remains the primary tool for Business Insider’s content delivery to its users.
I took the helm and designed the new logo. I led all focus groups and design rounds until the final voting was complete. The new logo intentionally uses brand styles from Business Insider, including the typography, spacing, and color sensibilities. The mark evokes motion, strength, fluidity, collaboration, efficiency, and imagination—all purposeful and informed elements from our process and research. We arrived at the name “Muse” through extensive competitive analysis, team workshops, company surveys, and voting.
The app building process was unique, as we had the special advantage of leveraging our writers from the editorial staff to help us improve on the old system, and build new and useful features into the future. I led all user testing and workshops with the group which was invaluable in informing our decision making with the new app.
The redesigned app allowed our editors more control over the way they shared their stories with their users by providing them with more engaging tools and efficient workflows. This helped them to tell stories more accurately, and able to deliver, faster than ever before.
Name changes.
After years of experimenting in a broader content market, “Insider” changed their name back to the original “Business Insider” in 2024. A style more aligned with the “Insider Inc.” corporate branding was applied for the new logo. A mark that I designed for the company’s corporate branding a few years earlier.
