A Smarter Reader Experience: Introducing the Redesigned TechCrunch

TechCrunch, the top news outlet for startup and investment news, has unveiled the first comprehensive redesign of its site since 2013.

Work & Co was brought on by TechCrunch a little over a year ago to design a boundary-breaking news experience for the site’s 12 million unique readers.

With more than half of the audience —a cross-section of entrepreneurs, developers, venture capitalists, and other members of the tech industry— consuming TechCrunch via mobile exclusively, Work & Co crafted a user experience that facilitates simple scanning and the ability to jump in and out of articles without ever leaving the homepage. The notion of stale “related articles” modules typically used to recirculate traffic have been traded for a design that keeps you immersed in the freshest content.

“We wanted to introduce a new design paradigm not seen in the news space that never directs readers away from the most critical part of the experience: a fast-paced feed of breaking news,” said Diego Zambrano, Design Partner.

Also new: a progress indicator signals how long a story will take to read, and elegantly conveys completion before auto-collapsing to drop you back in the main feed to discover new content. This evolved experience eschews the concept of “pageviews” as a sole engagement metric to focus on delivering an easy-to-use and attractive stream of important tech scoops and analysis.

Said Nicole Wilke, Head of Product at TechCrunch: “When it came time to rethink our site, we chose Work & Co as a partner because we believed that they could help us try smart new ideas in the digital media space. They delivered.”

She added: “It was a highly collaborative process. They took the time to become well-versed in the intricacies of our business, and instead of big reveals at set milestones, we were in constant communication throughout the process. That enabled us to experiment with a wide variety of ideas and to incorporate those findings quickly.”

A key challenge was balancing the clean and experience of the site optimized for readers with a news organization’s ongoing needs to monetization; it was critical to drive revenue to the TechCrunch brand with minimal disruption to readers.

“It’s always been our mission to build things millions of people love to use, but TechCrunch was particularly special because everyone here is a long-time reader,” noted Steve Kuhn, Group Director of Product Management. “It was an exciting challenge to help them introduce a new version that will ensure TechCrunch continues to thrive and capture new readers in the fast-changing environment of online news.”

More on TechCrunch’s redesign here.