Writing
Evolving Our Product Design Ladder
June 6, 2022
We recently updated our Product Design Roles documentation. It’s been a few years since our last big change, and our team has evolved a lot in that time. The basis of our ladder remains strong — most of the core competencies have stayed the same, but we needed to update some language to reflect new technologies, responsibilities, and even new levels.
The BuzzFeed Product Design Highlight Reel: Fall 2020
January 8, 2021
On the BuzzFeed Tech team our groups are consistently shipping small updates, new features, and entirely new products. Here’s a look at just a few things our Product Design team has worked on over the past few months.
The BuzzFeed Product Design Highlight Reel: Winter 2019–2020
April 27, 2020
On the BuzzFeed Tech team our groups are consistently shipping small updates, new features, and entirely new products. Even during these challenging times, the team has continued to push important features to our audience. Here’s a look at just a few things our Product Design team has worked on over the past few months.
Links I liked: 2019 roundup
December 30, 2019
A round up of my favorite things I read, watched, listened to, wrote, and baked this year.
Beyond the px — BuzzFeed’s Kelsey Scherer
October 21, 2019
I answered some questions about how I got into design and what my job looks like today. You can read them here (and see a great photo of me and Ada).
The BuzzFeed Product Design Highlight Reel: Winter 2019–2020
November 2, 2019
On the BuzzFeed Tech team our groups are consistently shipping small updates, new features, and entirely new products. Here’s a look at just a few things our Product Design team has worked on over the past few months.
Tips for Giving and Receiving Feedback
October 29, 2019
Why and how we give design feedback on the BuzzFeed Product Design team.
Links I Liked: August 2019
September 11, 2019
In an effort to clear out my tabs (and share more!), here are some things I’ve been reading, listening to, and watching recently.
Links I Liked: July 2019
JULY 28, 2019
In an effort to clear out my tabs (and share more!), here are some things I’ve been reading, listening to, and watching recently.
Links I Liked: June 2019
June 28, 2019
In an effort to clear out my tabs (and share more!), here are some things I’ve been reading, listening to, and watching recently.
The BuzzFeed Product Design Highlight Reel
June 7, 2019
On the BuzzFeed Tech team, our groups are consistently shipping small updates, new features, and entirely new products. Here’s a look at a few things our Product Design team has worked on so far this year.
Links I Liked: May 2019
June 4, 2019
In an effort to clear out my tabs (and share more!), here are some things I’ve been reading, listening to, and watching recently.
Stories we’re talking about this week: May 16
May 16, 2017
Every two weeks, the Storytelling Studio hosts an open meeting where we share story inspiration. We read or watch published stories (by Vox Media or elsewhere), and spend an hour with teammates and other colleagues discussing each.
Validate your story concepts through rapid prototyping
May 3, 2017
When starting a Storytelling Studio project, one of the first things we do is create a low-fidelity prototype to test our assumptions. In its most basic form, a prototype is a proof of concept for a story, a specific interaction, a new format, or all of the above.
Stories we’re talking about this week: April 4, 2017
April 4, 2017
Every two weeks, the Storytelling Studio hosts an open meeting where we share story inspiration. We read or watch published stories (by Vox Media or elsewhere), and spend an hour with teammates and other colleagues discussing each.
Tips for translating custom stories to AMP
March 8, 2017
The Storytelling Studio values the many touch points users have with our brands, and recognize that our own websites are not our most important platform. Most recently, our team has experimented with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). Here’s what we learned through some trial and error.
Stories we’re talking about this week: March 7, 2017
March 7, 2017
Every two weeks, the Storytelling Studio hosts an open meeting where we share story inspiration. We read or watch published stories (by Vox Media or elsewhere), and spend an hour with teammates and other colleagues discussing each.
Storyboarding a visually-driven story
February 28, 2017
On the Storytelling Studio, we’re always finding new ways to iterate on our process. For our most recent collaboration with the Vox Video team, In search of Forrest Fenn's treasure, we decided to try something new to us: a storyboarding session.
The best stories we read, watched, and listened to in 2016
December 16, 2016
Throughout our first months on the Storytelling Studio, we’ve prioritized sharing internal and external story inspiration within our team and across Vox Media. We have an open inspiration Slack room where colleagues can share stories, as well as a shared Pinterest board. Here are the stories our team enjoyed the most this year, in their own words — shoutout to Bloomberg for the idea.
Creating a design system for collaboration
October 26, 2016
The stories we create live in many forms beyond just our websites. Audiences experience our brands at various touch points, and we strive to meet them where they are. Because of this, designing a story is more than laying out a responsive web page. It’s building a cohesive design system that can scale and evolve between platforms.
Content is part of your experience, and other lessons from user testing
October 25, 2016
On the Storytelling Studio, we constantly iterate on process as its relates to both how we work and what we work on. This includes figuring out the most effective way to test usability of our projects. For our most recent collaboration, Curbed’s 10 streets that define America, we had the opportunity to test our assumptions with nearly final content.
How to make design reviews productive
October 4, 2016
The purpose of a design review is to review and discuss all design progress up to that point. It’s important that designers share their own work and to talk about the work they are doing, rather than a different person on the team sharing the work. A design review does not need to solve every problem, but it should identify areas for improvement so the designer can handle revisions and solutions.
AMA: Vox Product accessibility guidelines
August 31, 2016
I participated in an AMA for Designer News with Sanette Tanaka and Ally Palanzi.
Steal our accessibility best practices presentation
August 23, 2016
Ally Palanzi and I put together a presentation and shared it with the rest of the Storytelling Studio. This presentation is aimed at designers and engineers, but is applicable to anyone creating things on the internet for people.
Vox Trump Tax: People take screenshots. Design for that.
August 19, 2016
When Vox’s team set out to build an election forecast, their model predicted a Republican win. They had built a “fundamental model”: a model that relies on things like the state of the economy, the president’s approval rating, and more. Once you factor in current polls, however, the data tells a different story.
Open sourcing our accessibility guidelines
July 18, 2016
In May, six Vox Media team members gathered in Washington, D.C., for two days to figure out how to approach accessibility on a company-wide scale. We have many advocates for accessibility throughout the company, but at the time of our gathering, we didn’t have a company-wide structure in place to implement standards across the board.
Behind the scenes of Eater’s annotated Danny Meyer feature
October 16, 2015
Ryan Sutton, the chief restaurant critic at Eater New York, reported that Danny Meyer was eliminating tipping from all of his restaurants. We had a major exclusive on the news and good lead time, which allowed us to consider how the content would be presented.