The Challenge

Advance Local, one of the largest media groups in the United States, founded The Tylt as a youth-focused, digital-first media platform.

The Tylt team started conversations and collected votes to gather opinions.

Using hashtags and their proprietary algorithm, The Tylt harnessed social media and their website to collect, measure, and editorialize sentiment on culture, entertainment, sports, and politics.

The Tylt needed to modernize their owned experience. They wanted align with their Gen Z and Millennial target audience, integrate monetization, and increase engagement to deliver revenue from cultural insights.

The Solution

Accelerating Engagement

Leading a cross-functional team of designers and PMs to collaborate with Marketing, Sales, Engineering, and Editorial to optimize and improve The Tylt experience to grow engagement and drive business growth.

Vision & Planning

Product Vision

The Tylt needed to achieve growth and product market fit.

We analyzed market trends, customer needs, and the competitor landscape to create a high-level vision for achieving our goals.

Planning & Roadmapping

Product Strategy

After conducting our research and looking at the data, our product strategy emerged.

Since most of the traffic was coming from social media, The Tylt website needed a design system that focused on a mobile-first experience with emphasis on cross-platform brand consistency for the Gen Z and Millennial audience.

Once aligned, we identified key interaction points between The Tylt and our users, focusing on key areas of improvement and growth.

Internal Processes

Team Leadership

Managing and mentoring a team of product designers and product managers included taking part in office-wide initiatives, stand-ups, and 1:1s for collaboration and support across multiple on-going projects.

As our roadmap ramped up, we ran collaborative workshops to communicate and align to users needs while fostering a collaborative culture across internal teams.

We aligned stakeholders on research findings, facilitated discussions around innovation, and uncovered valuable design opportunities.

Design Thinking

Design System

Defineing product requirements required close collaboration with Marketing, Sales, Engineering, and Editorial teams. Together, we designed, developed, and tested a design system that served as a common language across print, web, physical, and social.

UI / UX

Product Development

The heart of The Tylt’s product experience is the voting module.

Starting here, we synthesized user research and UX/UI best practices to evolve the voting module to be mobile-first, ADA compliant, and styled for the Gen Z and Millenial aesthetic.

We designed, prototyped, tested, and brought a new voting module to life.

The voting module because a modular component that allowed us to quickly bring new types of voting experiences to market.

Our updates saw increased engagement to the tune of 200% increase in page views and 69% increase in votes per session.

UI / UX

Monetization

As engagement increased, we worked with brands to integrated sponsored content campaigns, display advertising, giveaways, and promotions.

UI / UX

Data-driven Features

As new experiences unlocked new data, we designed data-driven features unique to The Tylt and its audience.

🚀

Launch

Results

Votes loved their new experience!

The Tylt collected 104+ million votes from an audience of 700+ million people. 70% of The Tylt’s audience were Millenials and Gen Z.

Despite explosive growth, the Covid-19 pandemic caused Advanced Local to cut incubator funding, ending The Tylt’s run as the online sounding board for amplifying young people’s opinions.