The HubSpot Blog Redesign

At the end of the summer in 2021 the creative team was handed a big project: redesign the HubSpot Blog. As a major driver of leads, changes to design and experience on the blog property were hard to initiate, hard to get approved, and even harder to get blessed by leadership. But everyone knew it was time for an update, and the HubSpot Blog was entering a new strategic chapter that required a lot of thinking and a lot of cross functional focus.

There are a number of hard and fast business KPIs that measure the success of the work thus far for the business, but for us folks on creative, UX, UI, it’s a bit less about the data. A non-exhaustive list of our goals:

  • Solve for Scale

  • Build a product that works for the content creators & consumers

  • Design for flexibility to accommodate growth

  • Enhance Cross Collaboration

  • Improve Business impact

Why are scale and growth so important here? This isn’t just a redesign of a corporate blog property- the monthly audience of the HubSpot Blog exceeds Inc., Fast Company, TechCrunch and AdWeek.

In short- the HubSpot blog is a major media entity of trusted information for businesses.

Further- the project included the migration of a separate existing content property in the recently acquired Hustle, the addition of a new Hustle Blog, the addition of new newsletters, a company rebrand, and a directive to make the blog property more multimedia friendly to accommodate a growing list of 50+ podcasts and YouTube channels. If that wasn’t enough, all planning, design, and development had to take place without disrupting business as usual.

It was a big ******* deal to make it work.

The HubSpot Blog is a central hub for 15k pieces of content. Measuring success, testing new approaches, and improving user experience in that much digital space is key to the company’s success. These are a few of the top KPI improvements from the redesign and rebuild:

  • +18% click-through rate from Category Pages to blog articles

  • +78% newsletter sign-ups from Category Page Launch

  • +22% software signups from Homepage Launch

  • +14% (avg from all categories) content leads from Article Page Launch

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How did we get it done? A tight knit team of people who worked hard, asked tough questions, sought compromise, and stayed focused on the goal. The core team aligned closely with stakeholders to manage ambiguity between leadership changes, pivots when design changes hurt our core KPIs, but most of all- worked openly to build trust across job functions and create buy-in at every level of the company.

Kathryn Morris, Operations

Pooj Morjaria, Operations

Rebecca Hinton, Product Owner, HubSpot Blogs

Kendall Shain, Product Owner, The Hustle

Matthew Watkins, Creative Director

Design & UX

Nichol DeRosier & Liz Villate, Art Direction

Maggie Karaya, UX Lead

Alexandra Vásquez, UX Design

Justin Bosco, UX Design

Marina Welford, UX Design

Darcie Jade Faccio & Malary Lee, Editorial Art Direction

Development

Nhori Lopchan-Edmonds

Laura Hampson

Alex Ulfich

Samson Yuwono

Kara Ebrahim

Sasha Goldenson

Leah Shearer

Noel Kelly

Alan Murphy

QA

Rushiskesh Vispute

Mohammad Ahad

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