Polygon Guides
Case Study
How I used UX writing, user research, SEO, information architecture, and analytics to gain over 1 billion page views.
Role: Senior Content Strategist
Year: 2015 - 2022
Tools: Vox Media’s Chorus, User Interviews, Figma, Ahrefs, Google Search Console
Where the project began
While Polygon.com was traditionally a news website, we knew there was more to offer our readers. In an effort to provide more “service journalism”, we decided to begin producing gaming solutions and buying guides.
The guides program started in earnest concurrently with the launch of the Nintendo Switch game, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in 2015. The Breath of the Wild guides project became the blueprint for how Polygon created guides up until my departure in 2022. While I was at Polygon, the guides program amassed 1 billion pageviews.
The problem I had to solve
Polygon.com wasn’t built to accommodate the guides/wiki format that works for other publishers. Our goal was to test the depths of how our current platform could compete with the competition while understanding which solutions had to be built to stay competitive in this growing traffic category.
What solutions I came up with
Using a mixture of UX and SEO, we transformed our traditionally news-based site into a record-breaking guides website.
Design Thinking Process
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Empathize
We first needed to learn how users typically use and discover gaming guide content. Analytics showed us that 70% of our traffic came from mobile devices. User interviews made us better understand why most users would search for a guide from their phone/tablet.
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Define
Now that we knew that most users were looking up guides in the moment from a mobile device, the goal was to create content that was easy-to-find, easy to follow, and concise.
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Ideate
Creating guides that could outperform our competitors required an analysis of what made their content successful. We then decided on what areas we could improve upon. As a relative newcomer to the space, we could redefine what makes a "good" guide.
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Prototype
With a handful of common best practices and assumptions, we started designing the type of content we felt would best serve our audience. We tried to improve upon what we saw across the industry while creating guides that looked fresh and appealing.
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Test
As traffic came in, we quickly analyzed the factors that made our content successful. We used tools like Ahrefs and Google Search Console to learn what keywords were worth targeting. We tested the visibility of our content on multiple devices and solicited feedback from peers to improve the experience.
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Repeat
We routinely audited our content on a weekly and monthly basis. Not only that, we continually monitored our competition as our traffic grew, as more websites learned about the benfits of guides traffic. We refined our formula constantly never taking success as a reason to stop improving.
Polygon Guides Package
Hompage Wireframe
While Chorus wasn’t designed to be a wiki-style resource for information, after proving success with our guides program, we worked to create custom solutions to display content.
One of the unique designs we worked on was the UX design for guide packages. Whenever we created content for a new guide, we’d house all the information into a concise layout that could lead users directly to a host of different content they would need to complete their games. This design focused on quick readability and SEO.