Assembly
Organization:
Malala Fund
Year:
2020
Assembly is Malala Fund's digital publication and email newsletter. It's a platform where young women share about their lives, the issues they care about and to learn from their peers around the world. Since its launch in 2018, Assembly has published content by young women from more than 100 countries and in over 20 languages.
To reflect Assembly's robust community of young women and girls, we redesigned the website to feature a cleaner layout, expanded navigation, dynamic content and options to add multiple languages.
As the Product Manager, I led a team of designers from the design firm Language Dept. and engineers from web development agency CodeZone through the entire product development lifecycle from ideation, design and development through to launch. (continued below)
Assembly is a platform by girls and for girls, so creating space for user research in order to get insights from Assembly readers was essential during the design process. Nine previous Assembly contributors from Algeria, Brazil, India, Iraq, Japan, Nigeria, Mexico and the U.S. participated in the design review and user testing process.
One of the major outcomes of the user research was to have yellow represent Assembly. Most readers we spoke with really resonated with the color and felt it captured the vibrancy and energy of the platform.
Another popular feedback was the use of doodles and illustrations throughout the website, giving Assembly the look and feel of a personal journal versus just any website. The goal of the redesign was to make the website feel personal, and the use of color, highlights and illustrations definitely helped achieve that.
To capture a global audience and community, some articles are translated or written in the native language of the author. We included the ability to select different languages to give readers the option to read articles in languages other than in English.
The redesign saw website traffic jump by 21% and had Assembly winning quite a few accolades.
It won the 2020 Webby Award for Websites and Mobile Sites Email Newsletters, was honored for the 2021 Webby Honoree for Diversity & Inclusion Websites and Mobile Sites and won the 2022 Anthem awards for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion and Community Engagement.
