Pitchfork Reviews Explorer
Team
DESIGNLily Boyce, Danielle Carrick
DEVELOPMENTIshita Tiwari, Lily Boyce, Danielle Carrick
PITCHFORK CREATIVE DIRECTIONRyan Kincaid, Puja Patel
USER RESEARCHIsha Patnaik
CONTENT DESIGNSammie Spector
Objective
To help readers easily find older reviews that were relevant to them in a way that felt like browsing in the record store.
Challenge
Pitchfork’s bread and butter is music reviews. They’ve written over 30,000 of them since they were founded over 25 years ago. These reviews inspire eye rolls, validation, indignation, maybe even indigestion? As much as they’re debated, they are eagerly and voraciously read when they’re published.
The Pitchfork team noticed that older reviews were only picked out of the stack by their most consistent readers. As it was, the only way to find not-brand-new album reviews was by specifically searching for a single artist. Even so, user research found consistently that one of readers’ favorite things about the site was when they fell into a rabbit hole of discovery.
Approach
After some quick pencil sketches, I created a small manual dataset to iterate with. I love using Rawgraphs to quickly visualize different chart types and find what fits the story the best. After gathering feedback on an initial scatterplot concept to show both rating and date, I landed on a beeswarm chart that toggles between the two views.
User Testing
We brought in some avid Pitchfork readers to help us user test the first mobile prototype. You can see from the stills in this gallery, there are a lot of filter options and tons of colorways which tended to confuse the users more than interest them. So we removed some of the extra filters, moved them to the top for intuitive visual hierarchy, and kept the colors consistent across views.
Final Design
Metrics
- 4x longer user sessions
- Increased recirculation
Solution
After searching for an artist, you’ll see an interactive beeswarm chart of albums by similar artists sorted by their Pitchfork ratings. The tool uses the Pitchfork API so it's constantly updating as new reviews are rated. The user can filter by date or by rating, so they can look for the newest or oldest reviews in the bunch, or check out what’s highest or lowest rated. Search for an artist you like - I’m sure you’ll find some surprises.