A selection of design work from the BuzzFeed Product Design team
On the BuzzFeed Tech team, our groups are consistently shipping small updates, new features, and entirely new products. We said goodbye to 2020 and hello to 2021 by pushing new features and improvements for our users. Here’s a look at a few things our Product Design team has worked on over the past few months:
Quiz Playlists
Designer: Hana Carpenter
Team: Jingo Mante, Sarah Aspler, Audrey Engvalson, Evgeniy Udalov, Mark Gono, Kate Gutsol, Maks Pazuniak, Kiran Booth-Patel, Will Smith
We wanted you to naturally progress through a thematic quiz experience without running into a dead end. The result was a new feature where you can take three related quizzes in succession and get a compilation of their results at the end. Now you can find out answers to questions like “Which Princess, Sidekick, And Villain Would You Be In A Disney Movie?” guided by our resident Quizard along the way!
Why we’re excited about this
“Quiz playlists reframe bingeing BuzzFeed Quizzes as a more intentional and (hopefully) rewarding pastime. Ok, maybe you’re technically still just wasting time when you’re bored in class, but now there’s a little story you build as you go. And the new result at the end describes me perfectly!”
- Mark Gono, Software Engineer
Create your perfect soulmate using AI
Designer: Milan Samuel
Team: Paul Curry, Chris Johanesen, Max Woolf, Kate Gutsol, Peggy Wang
Our quiz team is always innovating and took up Twitter by storm on Valentine’s Day with the launch of a cheeky AI to build your perfect quarantine lover. This was our first ever BuzzFeed quiz that uses machine learning to help generate answers. The idea for this quiz was to create millions of unique combinations with ML-generated photos so that no two BuzzFeed users would get the same result. Have you found your perfect match yet?
Why we’re excited about this
“Our team turned into matchmakers and it was a blast. Using technology to make people laugh and cringe is the best kind of work. We have no control over the AI generated lovers so that divorce attorney is on your dime. Or if it works out, and love is in the air, we charge a commission.”
- Jingo Mante, Product Manager
Capturing Product Data in our CMS
Designer: Judith Leng
Team: Leora Katz, Christopher Kelly, Dmitriy Zhdankin, Jigna Lad, Yeny Santoso, Dmitriy Ovsyannikov, Nick Hedberg, Ruslan Piliuta, Ivor Tossell, Dang Vang, Nikolay Aviltsev
We know how important BuzzFeed Shopping is to you to get recommendations for products, read real reviews, see pictures of the products in use, and to get the best deals possible. Our market writers spend a lot of time and effort in making BuzzFeed Shopping so relevant, so we worked on a tool within the BuzzFeed CMS to lay the foundation for helping them capture more structured product data and displaying these products in an innovative way to you.
Why we’re excited about this
“This feature will help us unlock so many opportunities in showcasing products to our readers in different ways, as well as feeding more structured data into our pipeline. I’m excited to see how we use product subbuzz to power a more useful and delightful shopping experience for our users (and grow our business) :)”
- Judith Leng, Product Designer
Automated Ad Trafficking
Designer: Esi Ozemebhoya
Team: Jane Bang, Bryan Harris, Alex Perevalov, Ted Andricos, Jonathan Ginter, Igor Matchenkno, Maxim Capustin
Our BuzzFeed Ad Manager got a whole lot more exciting. We added a new feature to automatically push ad creatives from BAM to the Google Ad Manager by expanding the capabilities of our internal service called Distrotech Distribution Service. Our goal is to automate the trafficking process for all of our ad formats saving the Distribution team time and preventing trafficking errors.
Why we’re excited about this
“This launch marks another major step towards BAM becoming a more dynamic ad tech engine. Our hope is that BAM continues to serve as an internal hub for our ad operations, making the trafficking process more user-friendly and intuitive. It also feels great to be able to positively impact the workflow of fellow BuzzFeed colleagues, hopefully making their lives easier and freeing up some time for them.”
- Esi Ozemebhoya, Associate Product Designer
Automation Settings in PubHub
Designer: Alex Gervais
Team: Cody Pumper, Jacqueline Yue, Kevin Merritt, Andrea Handevit, Brooke Weil, Dominic Hanzely, Nathan O’Brien, Mireille Keuroghlian, Nick Gervais, Kseniia Komarchuk, Max Woolf
PubHub, our social publishing tool, provides recommendations and automations to publish BuzzFeed content to various social channels. We launched a new feature that allows publishers to quickly see the information they need to optimize each automation, and easily turn automations on/off overnight and on the weekend to maximize their impact. This will help our team ensure that only the most relevant content is being published to our viewers.
Why we’re excited about this
“BuzzFeed uses state-of-the-art social automation and models to give our social team super powers, and help them share our content to our social audiences in the best way. Making changes to automation in the past required working with an engineer or looking at complicated spreadsheets. Now for the first time, the social team can see a simple easy to understand list of social automations.”
- Alex Gervais, Product Designer
Accessible Color Palette for Tasty
Designer: Allison Krausman and Lisa Maldonado
Team: Laryssa Husiak, Maria Enderton, Bryan Li, Sami, Simon, Will Kalish, Jean Pierre Figaredo, Lizzy Grillo, Jeremy Back
Our Tasty designers worked closely with our brand team to create an updated color palette for Tasty which complies with accessibility standards! This also gave us the opportunity to freshen up our products by revisiting some typography, layout, and visual treatments. These updates have been rolled out across the Tasty website and iOS and Android apps to offer a more accessible experience for all you food-lovers!
Why we’re excited about this
“Since building our Tasty O&O products a bunch of years ago, accessibility has become a top priority for BuzzFeed, and it was finally time to bring Tasty up to speed. This has been a long time coming and I’m so excited we are finally able to offer our users a truly accessible experience, and that we got a chance to give Tasty a small facelift. This was a huge collaborative effort and I’m proud of this team for making it happen!”
- Allison Krausman, Staff Product Designer
Customizable Cookbooks in the Tasty app
Designer: Allison Krausman
Team: Sami Simon, Will Kalish, Jean Pierre Figaredo, Graham Wood, Adrienne Fishman, Lizzy Grillo, Jeremy Back, Randy Karels, Kyani Vasquez, Lizzy Bradford, Glaiza Julian
Cookbooks have long been a feature of the Tasty app, where we automatically organized a user’s saved recipes into “cookbooks” so they could more easily find their favorite recipes. Users had access to cookbooks like Dinner and Snacks, but had no way of creating their own cookbooks, which is something users have come to expect from digital recipe products, and something we knew was missing from ours. Our team fully reimagined the cookbook experience for the iOS app so that users can now organize their recipes the way THEY want to! We packed this feature with all the functionality users would expect — the ability to create new cookbooks, move recipes around within cookbooks, and more.
In scope of this project, we also took the opportunity to reimagine the My Recipes section of the app — where users can access their activity and saved recipes. The updated My Recipes tab now features three tabs, one of which is dedicated to Cookbooks!
Why we’re excited about this
“This has been a dream to bring to Tasty users since we first launched the app. Recipes are unique in that each one has a clear function for users in their mental organizational system. Instead of assuming people might want to organize their collection by cuisine, time to cook, etc. this feels like the ultimate opportunity to give people the freedom to express what is most valuable to them when they cook. We’re also excited by what this feature opens us up to be able to do including features like sharing cookbooks or sponsored cookbooks but also the qualitative data we will get from looking at how people think about and organize recipes.”
- Sami Simon, Staff Product Manager
We’ve got even more good stuff coming, so keep an 👀 out for our next update!
You can follow us on Twitter @BuzzFeedExp.
If this work sounds interesting to you, we’re hiring Product Designers, UX Researchers, Data Scientists, and will be opening up new roles soon!
The BuzzFeed Product Design Highlight Reel: Winter 2021 was originally published in BuzzFeed Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
