For the past 2+ years the Digital Product team has collaborated our way to a redesigning thestar.com. Read about how we started with redesigning the navigation, then the article pages that began with a Design Sprint and landed on this design.

It started with a Design Sprint

In early July 2019, we held what is known as a Design Sprint in order to kick off thestar.com Home Page redesign project. This is a program gets you results to take forward that are validated with key stakeholders and end users after just 5 days.

At the beginning of the sprint we work out the long term vision statement and this is what we came up with:

Vision Statement:
In 12–18 months our news homepages will be a relevant, intuitive personalized experience that honour the legacy of their brands.

We came back to this statement as we worked through the design activities, using it as a litmus to remind us if we were on the right track..

As part of the sprint we looked at leading websites that inspired us in some way. 

Adam Martin and Will Carroll came up with two different designs, one based off of the prototype we all chose to go forward with and the other was a re-skin of the HP we had at the time. We ran user tests on both desktop and mobile concepts with 5 people and learned what was working and not working with each design.

This work accelerated our work and thinking so we were able to enter into iteration and feedback cycles all fall and early winter.