UX/UI Design Case Study: Improving User Experience for The Women's Prize for Fiction

UX, UI make-over for The Women’s Prize for Fiction

A complete website re-style to improve the user experience for this famous literary prize.
Carswell Gould has been working with the Women’s Prize for Fiction for many years. The website continually evolves in an agile way and challenges our marketing, design and web talent to deliver new ideas and approaches that help promote and communicate this long running literary prize. With 5.4 million copies of award-winning books sold in the UK, a global community of 16 million women and 2,426 emerging writers supported through its programmes, it’s always an exciting and stimulating experience to work with the wonderful team at Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Women's Prize for Fiction Website Mockup

Our approach

To tie in with an increased focus on content marketing, the team was asked to rethink and improve core features and pages on the website and move it towards a magazine-style site.

The main objectives of the project were:

Improve UX (User Experience) for the primary audiences who visit the website, making readers’ content front and centre
Surface key content and improve browsing by overhauling ‘Reading Room’ content
Develop podcast, newsletter and live events features
Add a shop and e-commerce capability
Improve and simplify content editing on the CMS

Sharpening website navigation

The navigation has been simplified and moved from a side menu with multiple sub-menus and a top bar navigation, to a condensed menu bar. The menu was restructured to follow the new information architecture by removing the different paths for readers and writers.

Typograhy for readers

The website is now using Open Sans as its main font. Our designers made this choice because it is optimised for print, web, and mobile interfaces, and has excellent legibility.

We are not alone in thinking that Open Sans is a great font, in fact it is the second most used on Google Fonts! (source: https://fonts.google.com/analytics)

The outcome

This is a great example of how we work to improve client websites using UX, code and marketing talent. We hope it gives you some ideas that you can use on your own projects, especially if you are trying to transition towards an online magazine style website.

Women's prize for fiction dev wireframes

For the web geeks

Because WPFF is moving towards a magazine format, the web developers at Carswell Gould felt that it was the right time to boost the backend functionality and give the WPFF content creators tools that will make their lives easier when it comes to adding content and editing pages.

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