USA Today | Engaging Travel Guides & Contests
About My Role
This was my first role with the title of UX Designer. My time with USA Today taught me the importance of using data to drive decisions.
10Best, a subsidiary of USA Today Travel, is an online travel publication that targets content to specific, large metropolitan areas. Their best-of lists entail subjects like "Best Restaurant," "Best Attractions," and "Best Hotels."
Well-targeted SEO content allowed 10Best to compete with TripAdvisor, Time Out, Condé Nast, and similar publications. Readership of 10Best averaged three to four million visitors a month placing it among the premier online travel publications.
Job Title
Jr. UX Designer
Tools Used
Pen and Paper, Photoshop, Google Analytics, Hotjar
Big Win(s)
The contest promotion tools I created enabled Richard Branson to promote one of our contests across multiple social platforms.
A quiz experience I designed was syndicated across 150+ Gannett properties.
Homepage Redesign
As with all content marketing sites, the goal was to increase conversions and drive user retention. This was accomplished through expanding on the content and layout elements that already converted (like the slider). In addition, this redesign allowed us to capture additional revenue through weekly travel deals.
Readers' Choice Awards Nominee Guidebook
Readers' Choice Awards is 10Best's most valuable sub-brand. Each reader vote on venues based on selected topics. The most important part of the Readers' Choice Awards process is the contestant self-promotion aspect.
To promote participation, we published a guidebook along with social media graphic templates. Because of these tools, Richard Branson promoted one of our contests via Twitter. This guidebook proved an invaluable resource for our contestants.
10Best List Page Design
The most active template on the entire site, the list page, saw constant traffic in one hundred and thirty markets. We discovered, through research, that two types of users exist for these pages: scrollers and swipers. To that end, we created a slider that linked to the specific point-of-interest page.
Then, we created a page-long list of results below the slider (also linking to the point-of-interest page). These pages featured a rich content experience by integrating with Single Platform Actions that provide a number of value added services users' fingertips.
