Ilta-Sanomat Design renewal

Around three million people in Finland regulary receive their news through the Ilta-Sanomat news service. To streamline the user experience, we improved the visual cohesion through the introduction of a design system.

My role was to lead all design and user experience related improvements for the site renewal. This included communicating with all stakeholders at the client organisation and the collaborating with the development team.

Process

During two weeks of a design sprint, we extracted the essence of the previously cluttered user interface of Ilta-Sanomat. In the continuing website renewal project, we consolidated all elements and components into an all-encompassing design system. The system enabled us to faster prototype new features and reduce development time. During the project, we achieved improvements in the user experience, accessibility and general site performance.

Moreover, the design system made the design process more transparent because both developers and designers were able to co-create new elements through common rules and guidelines. By ensuring each component's accessibility we further improved the user experience for people using assistive devices.

Project setup

The design renewal was part of a larger website rewrite. Apart from building the interface components, we developed the ways of working in the team to facilitate the new design system.

Ilta-Sanomat website   Blog post