PCMag.com
Publishing Platform Redesign
Design Direction
Mobile UI
User Research
Commerce
Overview
PCMag's slideshow experience had become one of the company's most valuable publishing tools—but years of incremental updates had turned it into a fragmented product. Editorial, Advertising, Commerce, Marketing, and SEO all relied on the template, yet each new requirement had been layered onto the experience without a unified design strategy.
As the sole Senior UX/UI Designer on the project, I led the redesign of PCMag's slideshow and feature page platform, creating a scalable publishing experience that balanced user needs with editorial flexibility and business goals.
Challenge
The slideshow template sat at the intersection of nearly every major business initiative at PCMag. Editorial wanted greater storytelling flexibility, Commerce needed stronger affiliate opportunities, Marketing required consistent branding, Engineering needed a maintainable system, and the business relied on the experience to drive page views, advertising revenue, and search traffic.
Years of competing priorities had produced an experience that felt cluttered, inconsistent, and increasingly difficult to extend. The redesign needed to modernize the user experience while supporting existing business objectives without disrupting editorial workflows or SEO performance.
My Role
Senior UX/UI Designer (Sole Designer)
I owned the end-to-end product design process from concept through launch, collaborating directly with Editorial, Commerce, Engineering, and Marketing stakeholders.
Responsibilities
UX Strategy
Information Architecture
User Experience Design
Visual Design
Responsive Design
Interaction Design
Editorial Workflow Design
Prototyping
Design QA
Post-launch Iteration
Objectives
The redesign needed to accomplish more than visual modernization.
Improve the reader experience
Simplify navigation
Reduce visual clutter
Improve readability
Keep readers engaged through longer articles
Support both slideshow and long-form editorial content
Support business growth
Increase page views
Increase ad impressions
Drive affiliate product engagement
Preserve SEO authority
Create a reusable publishing platform that could scale with future content typesslideshow as a reusable publishing platform.
Results
The redesigned experience became the foundation for one of PCMag's most widely adopted publishing templates.
Following launch:
User satisfaction increased by approximately 40% (NPS)
Page views and ad impressions increased significantly
Editors could create multiple story types using a single flexible template
The platform became one of the most utilized publishing templates across PCMag
Ongoing iterations introduced new editorial capabilities and continued performance improvements based on analytics and stakeholder feedback
Product MVP and Results
The redesigned slideshow template launched as a unified experience combining visual storytelling and monetization. Within weeks, ad impressions and page views saw significant growth, and user surveys reported a 40% increase in satisfaction with nearly no negative feedback about the slideshow experience. The flexibility of the new template also enabled editors to repurpose it for broader content types, quickly becoming the most-used format across PCMag.
