An updated, media-focused homepage for Common Sense Media addressed user needs while opening up simple, bold ways to showcase our value and enact our mission.
Common Sense Media
Balancing reliability and novelty for an enduring brand.
Opportunity
To redesign the Common Sense Media homepage and shift branding to reflect what users were looking for: Trustworthy, age-abased reviews for movies, books, TV shows, and more.
Solution
It was clear from design research that our older, parenting advice-focused homepage did not reflect the needs or expectations of our users. According to a UX study we conducted, only a third of the page visitors had ever used the parenting resources and about half were aware that Common Sense was a nonprofit. We focused on simplifying the information hierarchy and prioritizing media reviews over advice content. We paired these updates with clearer, more consistent microcopy and a more prominent message about our mission as a nonprofit.
My contributions included:
Content outlines and copy for wireframes, user flow, and marketing CTAs.
Research and discovery, with a focus on brand messaging, microcopy, and hierarchy.
An internal content style guide for product writing, tested and applied for the first time with this project.
Page headline and section headline options, vetted by our editor-in-chief and aligned with our brand.
Brand messaging guides to help other content creators in the organization align their communications with the visual and verbal style set by the homepage refresh.
My role
For this homepage redesign: UX writing and content strategy.
Note: My broader responsibilities at Common Sense range from UX writing for our product team to copywriting, strategy, and branding work for our marketing and development teams. I have advocated for more time in our UX design process and product timelines for thoughtful, inclusive, and user-friendly content strategy and design.
The team
The in-house creative, brand, marketing, and product design teams at Common Sense.
Process and results
The project began with discovery: A cross-org project team attended a design studio facilitated by the UX researcher, and our core creative team did research to aid the discussion. Together, we set goals that balanced user experience and business objectives. We set out to increase engagement, strengthen brand perception, and restructure the homepage content to better reflect the core of our offering: to give families the unbiased information they needed to make choices about media and technology for their kids.
The result was a cleaner, more inviting, and more current Common Sense Media destination, with small copy shifts that helped users reach their destination, whether that was a quick search to check the rating of a movie they wanted to watch, or a deeper read into what Common Sense does and why they could trust and rely on our ratings.
After the homepage launched, we were able to see a significant shift in user experience, which over time will strengthen brand trust:
Organic traffic increased by 4.5%
Exit rate dropped by 1.6%
Content clicks increased by 10x on mobile and 4x on desktop
above: before! a look at content hierarchy, strategy, and UX writing before the refresh: cluttered CTAs, hard-to-read headers, and inconsistent, outdated language to describe the brand.
below: after! a simpler topline message, visual and verbal indicators for quality media choices (“common Sense selections”), differentiation between marketing CTAs and trusted editorial content; a warm invitation to get to know the brand and what we stand for.
Telling our brand story
After the new homepage launched, we also created a 15th-anniversary Impact Report, a funder-focused microsite to expand on the brand story we introduced on the new consumer-facing homepage. We consulted with an agency to help us plan and build the microsite, and I was the primary in-house writer for the report, which charted Common Sense’s efforts from 2003–2018.
