The two main objectives of the redesign of BetaBoston.com were to tie the site more closely to the main Boston Globe brand, and to provide better tools for featuring the best stories on the site.
Starting from an initial UX and visual design by team member David Putney, we worked to refashion the site with these goals in mind. Adding the Globe branding to the header was an obvious move. We also created a responsive 3-panel featured stories block, and we added new ways to present stories in the article stream further down the homepage.
On the article page, we experimented for the first time with presenting stories as a continuous stream. The next article loads automatically when the user reaches the bottom of the article, a feature that resulted in increased recirculation.
Michael Workman 