Connected is an award winning tech lifestyle magazine. Created by Rogers Digital Media, it’s delivered to five million of the top spending Rogers customers six times a year. The brief demanded an innovative website that would reinforce their technology content.

The site architecture was pivotal in grounding the users in what content the site would provide. I wanted to avoid a broad 7-9 item navigation, and moved to a grouped, two level navigation. On the top level, we reinforced the highest level categories: latest (blog), howtos and watch. Beneath that we provided popular categories so a user could drill down.  

The site optimized for search in a novel way: we introduced a ‘popular tags’ widget in the left rail. It would be the first thing that Google would scan, and it would link to the most popular, most visited topics on the site. However, while it would only display on the widescreen responsive version of the site, it would be rendered in the code at every level, meaning we get the benefits of SEO, while maintaining a clean experience.

This is how the UX strategy delivered on innovation: easy to read (responsive), easy to understand (clean navigation) and easy to find (SEO). Innovation is best when it solves a user problem, rather than innovation for innovation's sake.

 

You can visit the experience at: connectedmagazine.ca.