Douglas Hineline - UX Portfolio

Indy.com

Launched in November 2007

Generated 7 million page views a month.

Prior to August of 2006 I had been working as the marketing coordinator for the Indianapolis Star, and was primarily responsible for INtake Magazine, the paper's lifestyles and entertainment publication. As a marketer, I made significant gains in online readership and page views, but was unable to really attract the kind of audience that drives serious ad revenue. At the time I was conducting a good deal of new media style promotional campaigns and was constantly pushing my managers and editors to allow for more opportunities to expand our offering on the web. I didn't know it at the time, but I was to be given the opportunity to put my ideas into action.

After the success of IndyMoms.com, we were tasked with the redesign and total rebranding of INtake Magazine into Indy.com, the Star's first truly interactive social platform. The challenge was to present all of the Star's resources in entertainment, nightlife reviews and photo galleries, music and arts coverage, dining and events calendars into a cohesive social platform. This included AP news, video content, professional photography as well as user submitted galleries, staff and publicly submitted reviews and message boards. The challenges of building a site that drove traffic and readership for both the print product and the website was a challenge and an awesome opportunity.

The final solution was the first version of Indy.com. It was a truly hybrid and intuitive product, acting as a publishing platform/cms tool for editorial staff as well as a full functioning social network. I helped to work through the interaction model of the majority of the site features and was instrumental in making the site a powerful resource for Star employees. I was the lead production designer for most of the website, designing a great deal of the graphics, icons and media modules that composed the interface. I also hand coded the vast majority of the HTML & CSS templates personally. The site itself was built in Ruby on Rails and was a smash hit among the 18 - 35 market.

Acknowledgments

I have to thank both John Scott and Kevin Poortinga for being really exceptional designers and managers, for being great mentors and teachers and for making Indy.com one of my proudest achievements to date.