btchcoin news case study

One of my freelance projects was to completely redesign Btchcoin News – a weekly newsletter that makes important financial and economic news accessible for young Canadian women. Up until this point they had a very basic mostly black and white website and mainly relied on pushing out newsletters via MailChimp.

I was tasked to create a fresh new site and blog for Btchcoin that matches their fun and vibrant brand and tone of voice. Within 6 months of the redesign they were approached by a large Canadian news publisher and sold the business, an achievement that the website design largely contributed to.

I advised my client on best practices to create categories for the blog and keep all articles live on the site for new readers to see, and to futureproof their site for growth and revenue options including adding eCommerce section to the site and updating the site to have proper analytics in the case of potential acquisition in the future.

original website

A couple of screen shots from the old website before the redesign.

new redesigned website

Being one of my freelance clients, I am a lot more hands-on in advising in a holistic manner. The first step was to analyse the current website and processes, discuss what the Btchcoin News team wanted to achieve from their site and create a new sitemap, layout and UI and UX for their readers. The current site was very basic and did not convey the bold and colourful brand personality and tone of voice. The website needed a complete redesign to be visually stronger and house interviews, 101 guides, and news in an easy to navigate manner.  The content was either lacking (news articles being a single menu titled by date and replaced each week) or buried under multiple page links. My client has toyed with the idea of selling merchandise, so this was factored into the redesign should they decided to incorporate in future. I also advised other ways to generate revenue such as affiliate links, ad revenue or a possible acquisition. Therefore I advised them on incorporating site analytics for this purpose as they were not currently using them.

Primary overarching goals:

• Collect more subscribers to the newsletter
• Grow readership and site traffic
• Grow social media where their audience hangs out to grow word of mouth
• Add analytics to gain a better understanding of users and site traffic
• Open up possibilities to new revenue streams such as an online store, ad revenue, affiliate links, acquisition

Discussions with my client resulted in the following goals shared with me as well as my own suggestions from a UI/UX perspective:

• Pop up to appear on landing with the option to subscribe (and disable popup)
• Rebrand to be more colourful, visual, less black and white on text (define a visual style for images)
• Easy way to subscribe on each page
• Restructure buried content/text links to be housed on a topic page with relevant image boxes with titles for example Team links and 101 guides
• Add all newsletters from this year/missing ones from last year as a post on the website
• Rename all articles as a title/captivating headline versus date 
• Decide on a list of categories for posts to be tagged with, so users can filter posts by category tags that interest them

Defining and understanding the user needs

Btchcoin is a weekly newsletter with a simple goal: to make important financial and economic news accessible for young Canadian women. Btchcoin also provide useful guides such as paying off student debt, negotiating a pay rise, how to file taxes etc. Working with the team we discussed their readership and defined the overarching user needs the site needs to cater for.

• Relay financial news that can be intimidating to make sense without jargon
• A site for those looking to brush up on their financial knowledge
• A site for those who don’t have any financial knowledge and are looking to start
• Provide knowledge people born outside of wealth where financial information is much more inaccessible
• Keep readers up to date with news that they should know about

Creating personas

Working with the Btchcoin team, we defined several personas based on their readership.

Sarah: 14 – 18 years old

Studious high school student with ambitions to go to university to study a finance/business/commerce path and wanting to start to be clued into financial news in Canada

Motivations: Looking to get a headstart on a career path and establishing her future
Pain points: Finding financial news and information aimed towards youth is difficult, she’s just beginning to learn about it and most outlets are filled with terms and language she doesn’t yet understand and assume prior knowledge
Primary social media hangouts: TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram

Jenna: 19 – 24 years old

University student worrying about paying off her student debt and wanting to learn how to become financially independent and responsible

Motivations: Looking to pay off student debt fast, get on the house marketing in the near future so needs financial information geared towards her to equip her with that knowledge
Pain points: similar to Sarah, finding financial news and information aimed towards her is difficult, she has some knowledge but not much so is looking to become more financially savvy. Most outlets assume prior knowledge or aimed at people more established so topics often don’t apply to her/reflect her situation
Primary social media hangouts: TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter

Camille: 19 – 30 years old

May or may not have attended university, looking to focus on purchasing her first home/may want to start a family or has already had children, so reading on general financial knowledge as well as money-saving/budgeting tips is becoming a priority

Motivations: Camillie is looking to establish financial security and looking for information targeted for those in her situation who may not have a high salary to easily achieve getting on the property ladder while also having children/looking to begin a family with children
Pain points: similar to Jenna, finding financial news and information aimed towards her is difficult, she has some knowledge but most outlets assume prior knowledge or aimed at people more established so topics often don’t apply to her/reflect her situation
Primary social media hangouts: TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter

Kenna: 25 – 35 years old

Busy with work/family and is looking to gain a better understanding of financial and economic news in an easy and palatable format

Motivations: Kenna needs concisely presented information that’s easy to understand. She’s busy juggling her career and family life and is thinking towards establishing herself for the future possibly via investments and hopefully achieve an early retirement
Pain points: Time poor, struggling to achieve a work/life balance while also saving for the future, struggles to find content aimed towards her
Primary social media hangouts: Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter

Site Mapping and Wireframes

I first started by observing the current site layout and recreating a sitemap of the current items to have a better site structure.

Home

News

• This should have all previous articles in a blog list format with latest highlighted in a big box (vs current latest article in nav)

101s – Guides for Sh*t You Should Know (this should be a top-level page with all items on it with images and links instead of links off a secondary level menu)

• Fiscal and Monetary Policy 101
• So, you wanna start investing
• Precarious work + COVID-19
• Equalisation 101
• How to start a Business 101
• Five Tips for filing your taxes
• TFSAs 101
• Salary Negotiation
• Student Debt
• Blockchain 101

Moneycrush Monday

• Jenn Harper
• Mitzie Hunter
• Jacqueline Leung
• Marisa Clark

About Us

Testimonials – move onto homepage instead of nav menu

Election Coverage 2019 – move onto secondary menu as client still wanted it showcased

• ELXN43 Newsletter
• Liberal Party Interview – Minister Patty Hajdu
• NDP Interview – MP Peter Julian
• Conservative Party interview – MP John Barlow
• Green Part Interview – Critic Erich Jacoby-Hawkins

Contact

The wireframing process started with some rough notebook sketches to quickly visualise how the user journey should flow, where the users come from (direct landing, social, Mailchimp newsletter) I then worked on creating the UI of the tool and defining a visual style to be applied through strong use of imagery and using existing branding, and creating accessible style libraries to use including interaction design/hovers.

UX Strategy

As continuing to grow subscribers is important, implementing a sidebar that urges users to subscribe on pages throughout the site in a non-intrusive way is key to achieving this. As users browse the site they may find articles that really resonate with them so it’s important to give them the option there and then to achieve this. Adding in a search bar to the top navigation as well as the sidebar is also important so users can quickly find content they’re looking for. Category tags have also been added so users can filter by the topics that interest them the most. An Instagram feed has also been added to encourage users to follow on Btchcoin’s biggest social platform as this is where most of their target audience hangs out online, which is critical for word of mouth to help grow Btchcoin.