Donovan Dynamics
Work · Case study

The Huffington Post

Athena, the newsroom's publishing system, and the Realtime news app.

Senior UX designer · 2014–2015 · Publishing tools · Mobile apps

From August 2014 to August 2015 I was a senior UX designer at The Huffington Post in New York. It was a time when the homepage mattered. Headlines were loud, imagery was direct, and every story had to cut through a noisy, distracted day. Most of my year went into the tools behind that page: Athena, the system the newsroom used to write, illustrate and publish, and the apps that carried the stories out.

Athena

I mapped all of Athena, every module from the entry creator to page building, collections, image search, administration, blogger tools and stats, so the team could see the whole system before redesigning any part. In November 2014 a style guide gave those modules one visual language.

A map of every module in the Athena publishing system, grouped into Entry, Pages, Images, Collections, Administrator, Blogger and Stats, with a screen thumbnail for each.
The Athena system map: every module in one view.

The Entry Creator is where a writer spends the day. The story is written in a single column, with a media panel beside it, so images and embeds are found and added without leaving the draft. Image search shows the metadata an editor needs before choosing, such as the credit, collection and licence. A four-step crop sets each of the image’s ratios once, so one photograph can serve several layouts.

The Entry Creator's media library, a grid of image placeholders with a popover showing an image's credit, collection and licence.
Image search, with the metadata visible before an image is chosen.
The Entry Creator's crop step: a modal with four numbered steps across the top and a crop frame over a grey image.
One crop step per ratio, set once at the start.

Around the editor sat smaller tools: an alerts creator for push, Twitter and email alerts, and a stats dashboard that let writers see how their stories and their team’s stories were performing, what was trending, and how they might share their work.

Realtime

Realtime was the news app for iOS and Android. Readers could choose an edition, follow or hide topics, favourite articles and save them for later, and get alerts when a story broke. I designed the app’s screens and specified them for engineering, and explored a speed-reading mode that opened from a pull tab inside an article.

Two phone screens: the green Realtime splash screen, and the Filters screen with US, FR and DE editions and checked topics such as Politics, WorldPost and Sports.
Realtime: the splash screen and the edition and topic filters.

In 2015 I also helped art direct the redesign of the desktop and mobile websites.

What carried forward

Athena taught me that the people who make a product’s content are its first users. A newsroom moves at the speed of its tools. Every step taken out of the editor showed up as time given back to reporting, and that idea has run through my work since, from New York Magazine’s Composer before it to the dashboards I designed at Facebook after it.