We're a learning company - so naturally, we're into learning.
Collectively, our team spends a considerable (sometimes excessive) time reading, digesting and gaining insights from resources around the internet.
And often, it's a struggle. Not because the content isn't valuable, or we're not able to comprehend it, but because sometimes the design and user experience are just too painful to persevere with.
I personally spend ~50% of my day reading and rarely do I come across a blog or publication that's pleasant to look at.
So in an effort to be one of those examples (and hopefully make the internet a better place), we decided to redesign our blog. We wanted to make it as easy as possible for our readers to get value from the learnings we share.
We love writing blog posts. Not just for SEO, or for the brand image, but because writing helps cement the learning process and gives us the opportunity to share knowledge and start conversations with like-minded people.
Below I'm going to outline the most important elements of the new design.
Ease of use
Ease of use was the primary objective. We added a couple of things that make it easier for users to navigate our blog, keep reading our content, and subscribe to keep in touch.
We revamped both the blog index and post detail pages, so I'll explain them separately.
Index
Our old blog index page, while pretty decent, wasn't the easiest to navigate around. The posts were loaded all at once as a list-type layout, so the user had to scroll, scroll, scroll to look through our posts.
The new design uses a nine card per page layout, with a navigation tab for the post topics:
We chose this layout to make it easier for our readers to make their way around our blog, or find the kind of articles they're looking for.
Post detail
How often have you clicked through to an article, only to be met by chaos like this:
Oh dear! Would you like some article with your ads?
This is the kind of look that we wanted to stay as far away from. We wanted the design to draw attention to our words, and nothing else.
We were inspired by sites like:
Intercom
Medium
Helpscout
Reading articles on sites like these are a breeze and actually enjoyable to read on a screen.
Related posts
Sometimes when you're reading a post, you get to the end and you find yourself keen to read more.
In those moments, our old blog design wasn't very helpful. Readers would have to take a punt at what the 'Previous' or 'Next' posts were, or navigate their way back to the index page to find another post to read.
Our new design has both recent and related posts, so our readers can have a good mix of new and popular articles to feed their hungry brains with!
Colours and illustrations
While we love our bright colours (if you've seen our homepage, you know what I'm talking about), we decided to keep the colour to a minimum in the body of the post.
The reason for this is, again, to keep the design clean and clear the reading zone of distractions.
We did, however, redesign how our custom-drawn blog images displayed on the posts.
Our illustrations are central to the Yarno brand. We use them in all our internal and external materials, from little characters to full-blown comics strips (I'm talking about our Use cases here)
They're awesome – we love them, and most importantly, our customers love them too.
And eventually, we'd love for everyone that sees our illustrations around the internet to know that they're looking at a Yarno piece.
So we decided to have the post image front and centre. Literally. Check it out:
The post images are 100% my favourite part of the whole blog (maybe even the whole website!)
And why am I explaining all of this to you?
Because we're proud of it! We want everyone that comes to our site to know that we've thought hard about making their experience on our blog as wonderful as we can.
How do you like the blog redesign? We love feedback. Let us know in the comments!
