The Huffington Post
- ClientThe Huffington Post
- IndustryMedia & Publishing
- CapabilitiesFeature Prioritization · Content strategy
Redesign Huffington Post's site for global expansion
In 2015, The Huffington Post set its sights on rapid global expansion, announcing new international editions including HuffPost Arabic and HuffPost Australia. That momentum brought a clear challenge: a 10-year-old news organization needed its first major redesign to support a bigger, broader audience.
The work rebuilt the digital experience to help people discover, navigate, and return to more of HuffPost’s reporting across today’s many entry points, especially on mobile. It set the foundation for a rollout that would extend beyond an initial launch, with improvements designed to keep pace as the brand’s global footprint grew.
Around the same time Huffington circulated the memo, a team of visual and UX designers, content strategists, and producers from Code and Theory were taking a first pass at website prototypes and initial design concepts.
Some five months later, the first manifestation of the complete redesign—the mobile website—was unveiled to coincide with HuffPost’s tenth birthday.
“Mobile is the future, and the future is happening now.”
The mobile site’s design was informed by the fact that people consume news differently on a mobile device than on desktop.
They often enter news sites via search engines, links from emails or text messages, or through social media. With so many visitors entering through the “side door,” a major goal of the redesign was to find ways to encourage every visitor to stick around and explore more.
“Every article now acts as a gateway to the rest of the site,” says Jordan Jayson, The Huffington Post’s VP of Brand Strategy and Development. “We're treating every page like a front page, giving readers more opportunities to find relevant and interesting HuffPost content from the mobile web article itself through infinite scroll, related content and personalized recommendations.”
One interesting feature is the Article Summary Package, which was specifically designed to only show the first three paragraphs of a story with a prompt to "Read More." The idea is to give visitors the option of reading the story that brought them to the website in the first place, or check out related stories that might be of interest.
“We realized early on that people were reading a bit and then jumping around. Giving people the option to read the entire article—or not—lessens the barrier for people to discover more,” says Peter Gallo, a UX director at Code and Theory. “We saw a pattern in behavior and mapped a solution to address the problem.”
A big idea behind the redesigned mobile site was to give visitors more opportunities to share all parts of a story.
It’s why we’ve integrated several features that enable users to share “micro-content,” or parts of an article. While most HuffPost stories are inherently shareable, there’s also an audience for each of the bite-sized segments.
Window Pane Mode
Another concession to itinerant habits on mobile is the Window Pane Mode. Currently residing in the top right corner, the feature lets you look into different categories without navigating away from the page you’re on, giving readers a snapshot of the top news stories within just a few seconds.
Just the Beginning
The re-launch of The Huffington Post was a continuous and iterative process, which is a testament to the startup-like vibe of the organization.
To that end, the entire Huffington Post organization committed to better understanding how changes in search behavior and content consumption, technology, and social influence impact the way users interact with HuffPost.
Key Takeaways
Mobile-first redesign meets readers where they arrive through search, social, and links, then guides them into deeper exploration.
Make every article a navigation hub so “side door” visits still feel like a front page experience.
Reduce friction by letting readers choose depth quickly, encouraging discovery without forcing a full read.
Treat redesign as an ongoing practice that evolves with shifting search behavior, technology, and social habits.
A redesign built to evolve with HuffPost
The redesigned mobile site marked the first phase of The Huffington Post’s first-ever site-wide redesign, with more to roll out in the weeks and months ahead. Built around how people actually consume news on phones, the approach was mobile-first from the start. It reflects the reality that many visitors arrive through search, links, and social rather than a homepage. The experience treats every article as a gateway, making it easier to explore through infinite scroll, related stories, and personalized recommendations.
Features like the Article Summary Package, Window Pane Mode, and sharing of “micro-content” reflect a broader shift in how HuffPost wanted readers to move through content without friction. Taken together, the work rethought how one of the web’s earliest digital-first news sites publishes and delivers news. Those patterns support quick scanning, deeper reading, and easy sharing from any entry point. The result is a platform designed to keep up as HuffPost continues to grow alongside its global expansion.
Let’s get to work. Start a conversation.
newbiz@codeandtheory.comCode and Theory is a proud member of Stagwell Group. Stagwell is the challenger network built to transform marketing. We deliver scaled creative performance for the world’s most ambitious brands, connecting culture-moving creativity with leading-edge technology to harmonize the art and science of marketing. Led by entrepreneurs, our 13,000+ specialists in 34+ countries are unified under a single purpose: to drive effectiveness and improve business results for their clients. Join us at www.stagwellglobal.com
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