Gazeta Express - Valon Badivuku

The challenge

Newsrooms run on intuition, and good editors have excellent intuition about stories. About interfaces, less so. Everyone in the building knows the site too well to use it like a stranger would, so decisions about layout and navigation get settled by whoever argues hardest rather than by what readers actually do.

What I did

I went to the behaviour instead. Where people land, where they stall, what they never click, and where they leave, separating the readers who leave satisfied from the ones who leave annoyed, because those are different exits needing different fixes. The friction showed up in three places: finding something to read, moving around the site, and staying with an article once started. What I handed over was a prioritised list, not a report.

Results

A prioritised set of recommendations across information architecture, homepage layout, article page structure, and internal linking

Homepage decisions settled with data, in the place where the fight for space is fiercest and meetings never resolve it

Internal linking addressed, the cheapest way to turn one read into two and almost always neglected

Ordered so a busy team could start Monday with the item that mattered most and know why it was first, because forty findings gets you nothing

Gazeta Express is a prominent Kosovo news outlet. I came in as Analytics and UX Consultant to answer one question: what are readers actually doing, as opposed to what everyone assumes they are doing.

Newsrooms run on intuition, and good editors have excellent intuition about stories. About interfaces, less so. Everyone in the building knows the site too well to use it like a stranger would.

So I went to the behavior. Where people land, where they stall, what they never click, where they leave and whether they leave satisfied or annoyed. Those are different exits and they need different fixes. The friction showed up in three places: finding something to read, moving around the site, and staying with an article once started.

What I handed over was a prioritized list, not a report. Information architecture. Homepage layout, where the fight for space is fiercest and the data settles arguments that meetings cannot. Article page structure. Internal linking, which is the cheapest way to turn one read into two and is almost always neglected.

Prioritized is the important word. Any audit can produce forty findings. Forty findings gets you nothing, because a busy team will do none of them. The list was ordered so the team could start Monday with the item that mattered most and know why it was first.