01 — Role
Led UX from discovery through launch.
I led UX from discovery through launch, working closely with research, product, and engineering. I facilitated design workshops, ran multiple rounds of moderated usability testing, prototyped in Figma, and worked directly with engineering to get the experience built accurately inside both magazines’ separate systems.
02 — Problem
Same subscription. Two different access models.
JSH-Online’s two magazines were part of the same subscription, but their access models didn’t match. One had a hard paywall. The other had none. Readers couldn’t tell what they had access to or why they should subscribe.
03 — Discovery
Belonging, not just access.
Our research team surveyed existing subscribers to learn why they subscribed. Most described a straightforward subscription mindset, but a real number talked about belonging and identity tied to the publications. That shaped how we wrote calls to action and framed the offer throughout.
We looked at paywall models across the industry, weighed them against our subscriber base, and chose a metered approach: one free piece of content per magazine each month. That gave casual readers a reason to keep coming back without blocking them outright.
04 — Design & Testing
Three problems. All fixable.
We tested early wireframes against specific questions: Did readers understand the meter? Did they know what counted as a use? Did they realize that reading and listening to the same piece counted once?
Some readers thought unlocking content meant entering payment information. We rewrote the labels to make the distinction clear.
Some didn't realize they'd already used their free piece for the month. We made meter visibility persistent and harder to miss.
Audio pages read so similarly to article pages that people lost track of what they'd used. We redesigned the visual distinction between audio and article pages.
05 — Two Systems, One Experience
Same pattern, built twice.
One magazine had already gone through a redesign. The other hadn’t. They looked nothing alike — different layouts, different visual systems — while sharing the same subscription and paywall rules. There was no shared component library to build from.
I built the paywall, the subscribe flow, and the free trial experience twice, once inside each magazine’s existing visual system, and held the line on what had to match across both: the same copy, the same flow logic, the same paywall rules. Both builds followed the same accessibility baseline too — proper contrast, full keyboard navigation, and screen reader support with ARIA labeling throughout.
The result reads as one coherent subscriber experience across two visually distinct properties, even though nothing underneath was shared.
06 — Iteration & Validation
They said they liked it. They didn’t.
We introduced a three-click free trial signup flow readers could start directly from the paywall, without leaving the page. After launch, A/B testing on the free-piece warning message produced a surprise: readers said in testing that they liked the warning, but removing it increased trial signups and quality content views. We removed it.
07 — Outcome
31% up. One experience, two systems.
31% year-over-year increase in new monthly subscriptions. 2.6% overall growth in total JSH-Online subscriptions. Thousands of new free trial users. One consistent subscriber experience across two visually distinct magazines.
Reflection
Readers told us they liked the warning message. Their actions said otherwise, and the simpler version won. I learned that consistency doesn’t always mean shared components. With no shared system to build from, the thing I could control was the pattern underneath: the same copy, the same flow, the same rules, built twice instead of once.
Back to the start
Concord Design System