Phil Oye

About the project

The New York Times wanted to create a “business portal” for their direct customers, who are everyone who sell the Times to people like you and me (news stands, chains, wholesalers, schools, and third party delivery agents). The New York Times approached Sapient to create separate “portals” for each of the five audience groups to manage their account.

My role on the project

I led the creative team consisting of an information architect, a graphic designer, a user researcher, a content strategist, and a site developer. I also acted as the lead information architect and was accountable for the creative solution.

The solution

Early on we realized that building five separate sites was overkill becuase the different audiences had so much overlap in functionality. Viewing a statement is the same whether you are a news stand or a third party delivery agent. Instead, we built one site which used tiering and permissions to determine which functions were available.

The complex permissioning and tiering required the design to be highly modular, where elements could be hidden, yet still result in a coherent page.

The screens themselves weren’t too complex, basically tables of data or forms to collect data. We focused on making it as clean and simple as possible. The designer and I joke that the site “has a certain lightness to it”.

The live site

The site is a secure extranet so you can’t see much, but you can see at least see the homepage.