Sr. designer and developer for official university news source
roles: project management, team management, graphic design, mobile & web development, site maintenance, feature development, story development
In 2017, Northeastern’s Marketing & Communication Department split into a Marketing wing (which handled the traditional Marketing roles of producing on- and offline collateral, marketing materials, signage, and some inward-facing web properties) and a Communications wing (which began to produce the official news and information for the university). The news operation was patterned on commercial news organizations such as the Washington Post and the New York Times, mixing a daily schedule of local and student-centric news with deep-dives of research and researchers at the university. The newsroom also produced longer-form, “magazine-style” pieces that allowed space to showcase some of our talented photographers, videographers, writers, and other content producers.
As the senior member of the Digital Team, I was instrumental in shepherding the Communications Department’s web presence from standard university PR to the news-oriented operation it is today. Working in tandem with an outside vendor, we employed a user-centric design methodology—working with gathered user data and metrics—and employed a hybrid predictive/adaptive model for development and deployment which allowed us to redesign, redeploy, and migrate thousands of pages of legacy content, and develop a revised work environment for current and future content creators.
Along with the news operation, the team produces a daily email digest that goes out to over 40,000 readers a day and maintains a robust social media presence, presenting streaming content on research and culture not found anywhere else on the web. Constant iterative improvements in both site mechanics and content production and delivery have increased daily readership five-fold since the launch five years ago.