Variety
Entertainment news, film reviews, awards, film festivals, box office, entertainment industry conferences.
We redesigned Variety.com from the ground up.
The goal of the redesign was to create a more engaging experience for users by highlighting the best content. We created a new style guide for the site and applied that design language to every page of the site.
Building Brand Authority
Variety has established themselves as one of the premier entertainment industry authorities in news and reviews. For their digital presence we wanted to make their reviews a prominent feature of the homepage. The editorial team pours their heart and soul into writing thoughtful critics of the latest films, tv shows, music and broadway plays. The reviews module on the homepage allows users to see at a glance the latest reviews and which one’s the critics have given high honors with the “Critic’s Picks” badge.
The Who, What & Where Of
Celebrity Real Estate
One of the highest traffic pages on Variety is a section called “Dirt”. Dirt focuses on the celebrity real estate market and provides users with key stats like the city of the property, sale price and a gallery of photos. Dirt galleries are the bread and butter of these pages so we wanted to make this homepage section a highly visual experience. Users can roll over the different properties to see a photo of the property and then click into a property they are interested in to view the accompanying article.
Promoting Video Content
The Variety team creates a wide range of original video content. The wide range of content types on the site previously lead to their video content being difficult to find. We created a spot on the homepage to highlight the top videos of the day which lead to increased user engagement and improved pre-roll video sales.
Keeping Users On The Site
The article page of the site was designed to be easily legible and keep users engaged. Throughout the page we added in various ways to recirculate content. Users can see the most recent articles published by an author by hovering over the author byline. On the right side of the page we included an automated most viewed module which pulls in articles from the previous seven days which helps to reduce the bounce rate.
