New Wyborcza.pl website – or how we redesigned the icon

Gazeta Wyborcza is one of the Poland’s biggest daily newspapers. Since its very beginning, it was a leader of user experience standards – the offline pioneer. The publisher’s next step was to create Gazeta Wyborcza’s online version – tailored for today’s internet users’ needs. This is when we sprang into action.

What was the brief?

New Wyborcza.pl had to be fully comprehensible for today’s internet users and present standards fit for modern information portals. At the same time, we were challenged with preserving Gazeta Wyborcza’s classic, somewhat old-fashioned, flow of articles.

What was the background?

In the internet world, leading publishing companies tried to transfer the traditional way of displaying offline content to the digital environment, but did so without understanding the specifics and principles of the medium, and not knowing its users’ behaviours. We decided to break the mould and present our completely fresh approach.

The effects

Scroll exploration

Less links on the screen, more exploration by scroll – we have implemented content consuming standards similar to those in social media.

Modern, minimal and comprehensive

We have designed an intuitive portal, maximally adapted to the demands of online users, with the minimalistic colours of Gazeta Wyborcza. The service now has a fully modern look and feel.

Perfectly mobile friendly

Mobile version is the highest priority for every newspaper service. Content consumption away from the desktop is already huge and it’s still dynamically growing. Thanks to the new version of the website, Wyborcza.pl is perfectly prepared for the oncoming changes.

Comfortable reading of long articles

We wanted to challenge the opinion that reading longer content online is inconvenient. We’ve implemented all good practices to make the extensive materials light and easy to read. Now Wyborcza.pl uses narrower text columns, about 70 characters per line, sufficiently large line spacing and a balanced use of excerpts, quotes and illustrations.

Different content for different time of the day

In the morning, Wyborcza.pl offers shorter content to keep readers up to date. During the day, current topics are developed. In the evening, Wyborcza.pl serves deep analyses and expert opinions with a summary of the day. During the weekends, the service presents longer articles instead of purely news content.

Conclusions

The new Wyborcza.pl proves that the newspapers’ online version design has entered a mature phase. Instead of simply transferring solutions from paper to the screen, we adapted them to a modern website, all based on behaviours typical for the internet users. We used the potential of the internet to the maximum.