The problem
In 2015 I was part of Yahoo Storytellers which was an end-to-end customer content studio for Yahoo advertisers. The most essential part of the Storytellers offering were branded content microsites that lived across various Yahoo properties like Yahoo Style, Yahoo movies, Yahoo Finance, etc.
We had a dedicated engineering team based in India that supported with builds for all branded campaign microsites for us across Yahoo properties.
Due to a change in the global business strategy, engineering resources could no longer support branded content campaign builds.
The goal
Find a way to continue offering branded content microsites to advertisers as they were an essential part the Yahoo Storytellers offering. Maintain a similar look n feel and functionality as per Yahoo! magazines to create a seamless journey for our users when moving between branded content sites and Yahoo! properties.
The challenge
Tumblr did not have a theme that could mimic the design and functionality of the existing Yahoo! magazines.
The solution
We evaluated a couple solutions like, hiring engineering resources in EMEA and outsource all builds to external agencies. Both solutions were not cost effective and were not approved by the business. Our best solution was to build these microsites inhouse using tumblr as a publising tool for our branded content microsites. Yahoo had just recently completed the acquisition of Tumblr.
My role
I was the Lead UI/UX Designer on this project. I worked closely with the product owner and a developer to build a template/theme that replicated the Yahoo properties design and functionality.
I also conducted extensive inhouse user testing before successfully launching this template.
Yahoo magazines
The template we built on Tumblr
Some of the microsites we built:
Post launch I continued to maintain and improve the performance of the template.
The results
We successfully launched this product in 2015 and is still being used to build branded content microsites across EMEA.
