Story Packages
Role Design & Research Lead
Company Vox Media
Story Packages are curated collections of articles or media across Vox Media’s editorial brands (350+ websites). I launched a unified, flexible template that made packages more discoverable, visually distinct, and easier for users to explore—while reducing editors’ production time.
A look at the various story packages created with the new template. Link to press coverage.
Originally, each package had to be custom-designed and coded. They were extremely time-consuming to produce from both an editorial and product perspective. Yet they remained critical to Vox Media’s brands’ editorial strategies, making up high-investment pieces like city guides, game guides, longform collections, and shopping guides.
After researching and defining core user pain points, I learned these one-off packages often:
Buried links to individual stories within long introductory text
Misled readers into thinking they were reading a single article rather than a collection
Had low engagement: readers rarely explored beyond the first article
The Challenge
Story Packages were time-consuming for editors to produce, and suboptimal for users to read
Before redesign: custom-designed and custom-coded Story Packages
After much iteration, I landed on a flexible template organized into four main sections: a top visual cover to immediately draw attention to featured content; a table of contents listing all stories up front; a short intro that explains the package’s purpose; and a prominent entry point to the first story.
I also proposed a modular grid system to ensure the template was flexible enough to support myriad needs—from text-heavy to visual, and from small to 100+-article collections. Visually, increased white space and stronger branding helped packages feel special ✨.
Proposed design
A template providing both organization and flexibility
Four sample layouts following the grid system
The new packages launched across multiple brands in short order: Recode’s “Recode 100,” Vox’s “Understanding the Trump Era,” Polygon’s “Monster Hunter: World” game guide, Eater’s “Eating Out Loud With Jessica Valenti,” and Curbed’s “Tiny Town, USA.”
Post-launch, users browsed more articles per session in a package vs. standard article formats. Packages became more discoverable and engaging, with navigation and visual hierarchy helping readers understand they were seeing a collection. Editors also benefited: building new packages became much faster and more predictable due to the templated system.
Launch and Impact 🚀
Launched packages on Recode, Vox, and Polygon
The flexible template has powered hundreds of story packages
Editorial flow in Vox Media’s content management system
This project reinforced to me how powerful structure is in editorial UX — not just about styling, but for guiding users’ expectations and flow. If I were to revisit this, I’d explore even more custom themes within packages and perhaps better personalization of content ordering based on users’ previous behavior.