STARTING FROM SCRATCH

A NEW TAKE ON SATIRE

Early in their development, they required an identity and website to bring the publication to life. After their first year establishing themselves, the organization had grown tremendously and was ready for an updated and redesigned website.

MANY HATS

MY ROLE

I was a founding member and the organization’s first Editor-in-Chief. In addition to overseeing all content produced by The Mugdown, I was in charge of developing the website, managing content, and establishing the brand.

PROJECT GOALS

DESIGNING FOR AN ESTABLISHED BRAND

For the new website, it was important to the organization’s members that a cutting edge design would be implemented. The new Mugdown would be a Responsive Website for the many mobile readers. Social Media sharing options would be pushed since that is where the vast majority of The Mugdown’s views come from and where virtually all the discussions of the articles’ content takes place; those conversations being a fundamental part of The Mugdown’s mission statement.

The Mugdown was started by a group of six students with a simple idea in mind: to challenge the status quo of Texas A&M and challenge their readers to think.

This group of students agreed that the student body of Texas A&M takes itself too seriously. There were flaws and trends that were present, but hardly discussed. The Mugdown was created to provide an avenue to discuss those topics.

The Founders & THOSE THAT INSPIRED THEM

INTERVIEWS WITH INSPIRING PEOPLE

We interviewed both the original founding members in depth and reached out to other popular satirical news organizations for input. As a new organization, it was always important to understand both what the founders were looking to accomplish and how others had accomplished those goals in the past. We reached out to the short-lived satire papers of Texas A&M’s past as well as the many well respected satire organizations that have been running for decades including The Onion, The Harvard Lampoon, The Yale Record, and The Texas Travesty.

Competitive Analysis

DRAWING INSPIRATION

In addition to interviewing other organizations, we looked at some of the major features they had implemented that The Mugdown had either already implemented themselves or were hoping to implement in the future.

STEP 1

Discover

Writing down what’s more than words

WHO IS THE MUGDOWN?

Moving forward with the redesign, we locked down what made The Mugdown the organization it was.

THE MUGDOWN’S AUDIENCE

WHO READS THE MUGDOWN?

SITE AUDIT

LEARNING THE NITTY GRITTY

Now it was time to get into more of the nitty gritty details. Who is The Mugdown’s primary demographic and what are some important behaviors they show? Additionally, what are the KPIs that The Mugdown has accomplished in its tenure?

During the research, we honed in on the largest issues that needed to be resolved and key areas we could improve. Once the problems were defined, it was time to start working on solutions.

We documented where we encountered these problems and how other sites were handling them. Lots of screenshots were taken and plenty of notes annotated.

WEEKLY POST REACH
30k

WEEKLY IMPRESSIONS
90k

AVERAGE POST REACH
2.5k

6600 followers

7500 followers

1600 followers

DAILY EMAIL SUBSCRIBERS
130

 USER STORIES

PUTTING PERSONAS IN PERSPECTIVE

With our Primary and Secondary Personas, we were then able to begin crafting user stories around these personas and each of their needs.

STEP 3

Develop

STRUCTURING CONTENT

CATEGORIZING ARTICLES

Now that we had a year’s worth of articles, we wanted to see which topics were the most popular we were writing on. To do that, we took our Top 25 most viewed articles and had users sort them into whichever categories felt they made sense.

In addition, we needed to better incorporate the many new branches of media The Mugdown was starting in addition to its traditional articles such as podcasts, YouTube videos, social media accounts, physical print newspapers, and an online shop.

QUICK & EASY A/B TESTING

PAPER PROTOTYPE

For the Paper Prototype, we tried out a couple options for each issue taking inspiration from multiple sources. After A/B Testing was complete, we chose the best fit to move forward into Low Fidelity.

RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN

LOW FIDELITY WIREFRAMES

Since a huge proportion of The Mugdown readers are mobile users often coming from Twitter and Facebook, the site was designed to be a premiere Responsive Website through all the changes. These wireframes were drafted in Sketch and then uploaded into InVision for testing before being approved for a more high fidelity rendering.

STEP 4

Deliver

THE NEXT STEPS FOR THE MUGDOWN

SENIOR BOOTS