As user experience designer for CQ Roll Call, I led the redesign of CQ’s 17 email newsletters, creating mobile-first, well-branded and visually consistent designs.
CQ, a heavy-duty SaaS product that allows users to track federal legislation, offers users various email newsletters as part of their paid subscription. When I took on this project, most of the emails hadn’t been touched in years; almost none of them were responsive and therefore largely illegible on a mobile device — the primary way users wanted to read their email. Furthermore, every single one of the newsletters looked different.
Getting started, the UX team looked at every single newsletter and identified common elements across them all, working to create consistency among content types and patterns.
I came up with a style sheet outlining the visual design for all newsletters. I modernized and streamlined the typography, styling and color palettes.
I also created all of the newsletters’ logos, also previously inconsistent. The project resulted in a well-branded, consistent suite of products.
The newsletters were then redesigned for how clients read them: on their phones. To add to this, we developed the editorial concept of “skim and dive,” formatting the newsletters so that they were easily scannable on a phone, while still allowing users to dig deeper as they scrolled if they wanted.