Black Youth Project

Black Youth Project (BYP), a project-in-residence at The Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture (CSRPC) at the University of Chicago, was founded in 2004 by Professor Cathy J. Cohen as a national research project to examine African-American youth ages 18-30. The BYP website functions as an online platform to feature the voices of Black youth, expand their human and social capital, and facilitate their empowerment by highlighting their experiences and ideas. The articles and videos housed on blackyouthproject.com, which fall into several different categories including gender and sexuality, politics, education, race, and entertainment, are written by scholars, educators, community activists, youth allies, and Black youth and Millennials.

In the Spring of 2017 I was contacted by the Head Editor of BYP, Jenn M. Jackson, to overhaul the website and give it a fresh look and architecture that reflected the spirit and youth of the platform. At that time, the site was formatted like a blog, which meant new content was very quickly being pushed far down on or completely off of the homepage and required several clicks by the visitor to see articles that were still relevant and deserved more eyes and interaction. My goal was to design a homepage and category landing page interfaces that would fit considerably more content above-the-fold (primarily via desktop) and to design an article page interface that would entice visitors to engage with additional articles both new and related to the article they were reading (primarily via mobile).

Post redesign, site-wide page views were increased by an average of 19k per month, and the homepage bounce rate was decreased by almost 10%. In layman's terms, the new blackyouthproject.com entices visitors to browse the site for a considerably longer time whether they enter on the homepage or an article, as is the case with most users who click through from Twitter and Facebook.