Mono.Batenka.ru Алексей Ферапонтов
This work
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UX, UI & Journey Design
Task
Batenka.ru is a prominent Russian webzine with its focus on long-form journalism and quality stories. When we started Mono.Batenka.Ru we had two objectives in mind. The first one was purely journalistic, we wanted to tell the history of Russian 20th century through the prism of monotowns. The second was to experiment with UX in multimedia longforms, which are usually an endless scroll with little interaction with a reader and are not very convenient on mobile
Ideas and solutions
We have published a series of 6 stories, each dedicated to a different monotown. Each town symbolizes a period of Russian history when it was established. Thus, by telling about towns we told the story of the country as well. As for UX and navigation, we took the NY Times story about Rohingya as a reference. Instead of scrolling, we split the text, photos and videos into small bits and made them swipable. The solution made the reading experience closer to what everybody's doing now on social media, e.g. Instagram stories or Tinder. The results showed that for all stories average page depth and session duration were about 20% higher on mobile than on desktop, whereas the bounce rate was 10% lower. The stories generated more than 55 thousand sessions with 500 thousand page views, and an average session duration of 7:12 minutes. http://mono.batenka.ru
