During my time leading product and design at GQ, I focused on range of challenging projects that resulted in significant audience and revenue growth.
My areas of focus were on all consmer facing experiences for GQ.com, the core editorial experience, commerce-like products for their fashion, style, and grooming service, performance, speed, and optimization, all back end systems, and the ad experience. In my time there, GQ grew from just 2MM monthly uniques 20MM at its peak.
Some of the more important consumer facing projects I’ve worked on include a photo gallery redesign, category and homepage redesigns and improvements focused on style advice and products recommendations, a major overhaul to our newsletter product, and launched new commerce focused brands and products such as GQ Best Stuff, GQ Recommends, and GQ Style.
Creating a product and brand style guide that would leveraged for digital, video, and social content as well as, and events.
By creating a style guide and agreeing to a “look and feel” early on in the design process, this would allow for easier decision making in the design process and provide consistency across all the various teams and departments across GQ and Condé Nast. These bold and solid colors along alongside a clean typeface would be applied to all elements within the interface and on all GQ digital properties.
GQ Newsletter Subscriber Growth Strategy
A big goal for GQ starting in late 2015 was to increase our newsletter distribution list, as well as to create various newsletters that are more target towards certain users.
Scaling our newsleter to other GQ brands most of Condé Nast brands – including The New Yorker, Vogue, Glamour, and WIRED.
By bringing our newsletter system into our internal CMS, distributing the code and the product to all other Condé Nast brands became possible and allowed for a more seamless and faster production process than before.
We created a flexible, lightweight newsletter template that could be reused for different GQ newsletters as well as different brands across Condé. The goal was to keep each template flexible and provide options for different use cases. GQ created multiple templates and databases to help grow our newsletter audience. In addition to our ‘GQ Daily’ and ‘GQ Weekly’, the others created were ‘GQ Late Night’, ‘GQ Best Stuff’, ‘GQ Style’ and ‘GQ Fitness Tips’.
We also develop several variations of newsletter sign up forms throughout the website. These forms (which included an landing page inline form, an article riser, and a standalone subscribe and unsubscribe page) would be templated and flexible in a way that would allow us to to easily spin off new newsletter templates.
The 'GQ Best Stuff' newsletter was by far our most unique.
The goal for this newsletter was to not just drive website traffic, but to provide our fashion & style audience with a weekly digest of products we’ve tested and truly love. This newsletter was also a small, but important first piece in growing the Best Stuff brand identity, and testing new ideas in terms or products and content.
The Results
A lot of learnings about newsletter growth came out of this project. On a positive note, bringing the newsletter creation process from our old system into our new CMS saved us over 45 minutes a day in production time (almost 1,750 hours a year). Our newsletters were smaller in size, ADA compliant, and worked great across all major devices, browsers and email clients.
One thing we learned was that it’s not easy to grow a newsletter subscription base from scratch. On top of that, it’s not easy to get new users to subscribe to our existing newsletters. While we haven’t done so just yet, a big goal in 2018 is to test new ideas for make the sign up phase simpler and entice users to sign up.
Photo Gallery Redesign
GQ's photo gallery was (and is) one of our most major consumer facing products. The gallery was previously not designed with users or mobile in mind. The design was made to force as many ad impressions in as possible, leaving the user with a painful experience to get from start-to-finish (for those who even finished)
Below you could find designs and results of the new gallery (live version here) that went through several design iterations, prototyped, and tested thoroughly with real GQ users.
The Results
80% increase in completion rate rate for the vertical gallery design. Our end-of-gallery recirculation unit had an average of a 45% click-through rate, up from just 3% on our old galleries. The new version of our gallery saw an 8% increase in total sales, 11% increase in average order value and a 14% increase in average revenue generated.
We also introduced a new sponsor content unit that had been sold several times by GQ sales team.
Channels & Category Page Redesign
Our Channels & Category page redesign had many goals.
1. Improve the experience and display of content on these pages.
2. Create a flexible system of reusable components that could be easily used anywehre within GQ.com.
3. Clean up and simplify the way to classify our content.
4. Bring an element of utility and service to our Style and Grooming pages, two highly trafficked pages.
Other areas of focus included commerce, discovery of GQ’s franchises and video series, increase in click-through to galleries, articles and other landing pages, SEO, engineering efficiency, editorial and production efficiency, and performance.
See below for more or check out the final designs at GQ’s style, grooming, travel, culture and fitness sections.
The Results
Our category pages just launched in late November. While we’ve already seen an increase in daily visits to our Style landing page, and we knew that these pages would be successful in terms of our goals for the projects, its too early to measure success in key business metrics including engagement and revenue. Stay tuned for more results!
Product Recommendations
GQ knows that our loyal audience comes back for fashion, style, and grooming advice and recommendation. Without making users go into an article or gallery, we’ve opted to present product recommendations on it’s respected sections. All these products are endorsed and tested by our team of editors.
Franchises, Series, and Collections
GQ has a number of well-known franchises and video series that users come back for – Keith Olberman’s The Closer, GQ What to Wear Today, New Arrivals, Grooming Awards, Netflix Binge Guide, Men of the Year, Gift Guides, Comedy Issue and more. Prior to this project, there was no way to discover or find these series and find the latest from within. In the new designs, content from our latest franchises, which tend to be our most performant content, is front and center.