El Nuevo Día

END-hero

El Nuevo Día, founded in 1909 and largely known for its political reporting, is the most widely read newspaper in Puerto Rico. In 1997, El Nuevo Día launched its first website, then known as “El Nuevo Día Interactivo.” It was the very first mainstream website in Puerto Rico to launch.

Happy Cog partnered with El Nuevo Día for a comprehensive redesign, primarily to more closely align with a recent print redesign, and make it easier for their readers to access and explore the wealth of content the site published. Their existing site had separate mobile and desktop versions, which resulted in a lag in delivering breaking news to mobile users.

Happy Cog approached these challenges from a few different angles. First, we assessed the taxonomy of their existing site and streamlined classifications and categorizations. This resulted in a dramatic reduction in clickable options for readers, resulting in more focused, intuitive navigation.

What we did

Research
Design & Branding
Development
Front-end Development
Implementation support
Information architecture
Internationalization
Stakeholder interviews

Industry

Media/Publishing

Site navigation is streamlined for easy wayfinding across all screen sizes.

On small screens, navigation and breaking news collapse into drawers.

A universal challenge of redesigning a news website is the context and tone of any page can change daily—even hourly—based on the news that day. Our design system had to communicate the El Nuevo Día brand with the appropriate typeface, yet take a backseat to the content. Typefaces were chosen that were also versatile enough to fit the tone of any news topic. And of course, the design had to look great in Spanish.

Performance was a key consideration from the project’s inception. It was crucial we consider a large audience when approaching the redesign. We planned for the readers to be in a variety of circumstances, on a plethora of screen sizes, and a diverse range of connection speeds. Not only could a page’s overall design change based on the ads next to it but third party advertisements always introduce a performance challenge. With careful planning, the design system became lightweight and fast, yet flexible enough to account for the urgent demands of a daily online newspaper.