The Challenge

Advance Local, one of the largest media groups in the United States, founded The Tylt as a youth-focused, digital-first media platform.

The Tylt team started conversations and collected votes to gather opinions.

Using hashtags and their proprietary algorithm, The Tylt harnessed social media and their website to collect, measure, and editorialize sentiment on culture, entertainment, sports, and politics.

The Tylt needed to modernize their owned experience, grow it, and increase revenue.

The Solution

Mobile-first Growth

Leading a cross-functional team of designers and PMs to collaborate with Marketing, Sales, Engineering, and Editorial to optimize and improve The Tylt experience to grow engagement and drive business growth.

We aligned with the Gen Z and Millennial audience, taking a mobile-first approach and optimized for cross-platform consistency.

Vision & Planning

Product Vision

The Tylt needed to achieve growth and product market fit.

We analyzed market trends, customer needs, and the competitor landscape to create big picture ideas, finding product-market fit and opportunities for growth.

Planning & Roadmapping

Product Strategy

After conducting research and looking at the data, our product strategy included short-term wins moving towards long-term growth.

Since most of The Tylt’s traffic was coming from social media, The Tylt product needed a design system with emphasis on cross-platform brand consistency.

Once aligned, we identified key interaction points between The Tylt and our users, focusing on these key areas for improvement and growth.

Internal Processes

Team Leadership

Managing and mentoring a team of product designers and product managers included taking part in office-wide initiatives, stand-ups, and 1:1s for collaboration and support across multiple on-going projects.

As we collaborated with Engineers, Editors, and the company at large, our roadmap ramped up. We aligned stakeholders on research findings, facilitated discussions around innovation, and uncovered valuable feature opportunities.

We ran collaborative workshops to communicate and align, fostering a collaborative culture across internal teams and keeping a focus on our Gen Z and Millennial audience.

Design Thinking

Design System

Understanding product requirements required close collaboration with Marketing, Sales, Engineering, and Editorial teams.

Together, we designed, developed, and tested a design system that served as a common language across print, web, physical, and social.

UI / UX

Product Development

The heart of The Tylt’s product experience is the voting module.

Starting here, we synthesized user research and UX/UI best practices to evolve the voting module to be mobile-first, ADA compliant, and styled for the Gen Z and Millenial aesthetic.

We designed, prototyped, tested, and brought a new voting module to life.

The voting module because a modular component that allowed us to quickly bring new types of voting experiences to market.

Our updates saw increased engagement to the tune of 200% increase in page views and 69% increase in votes per session.

Once growth was under way, we integrated monetization and delivered revenue from cultural insights.

UI / UX

Monetization

As engagement increased, we worked with brands to integrated sponsored content campaigns, display advertising, giveaways, and promotions.

UI / UX

Data-driven Features

As new experiences unlocked new data, we designed data-driven features unique to The Tylt and its audience.