Product | Design | Brand Management • Ooreka

TL;DR

Led product design for Ooreka, a content-based website editor that scaled to 460 specialized websites reaching 20 million unique visitors monthly. Served as sole designer defining user experience, visual identity, and design systems while establishing industrialized processes to maintain consistency across the entire platform.

The challenge: designing at industrial scale

Ooreka’s ambitious model—publishing highly targeted content across hundreds of specialized domains—required maintaining design consistency, user experience quality, and brand coherence across a massive, rapidly growing ecosystem.

As sole designer, I faced the challenge of creating frameworks robust enough to scale industrially while remaining flexible enough to serve diverse content types and user needs.

My approach

1. Discovery: aligning business and user needs

• Stakeholder collaboration: Gathered requirements from CEO and marketing teams to understand business objectives
• User research: Conducted A/B testing campaigns, lab usability tests, and AT Internet data analysis to validate assumptions
• Information architecture: Designed scalable IA patterns adaptable across 460 different subject domains
• Custom CMS: Partnered with CTO & editorial team to identify technical constraints and industrialization opportunities to built and improve a custom CMS

2. Design: building systems for scale

• Responsive UX/UI: Created user flows, wireframes, prototypes, and design systems ensuring consistent experience across devices
• Functional conception: Defined user workflows, feature specifications, user stories, and interaction patterns for all platform features
• Design system: Established reusable components and templates enabling rapid, consistent website deployment
• Brand identity: Developed cohesive visual language extending across websites, print ads, radio campaigns, and video content

3. Optimize: continuous improvement through data

• SEO integration: Collaborated on content and UX patterns optimized for search performance
• Performance monitoring: Worked closely with CTO to ensure platform speed and reliability at scale
• Iterative testing: Used analytics and user testing to refine features and validate design decisions
• Template industrialization: Created systematic processes enabling efficient deployment of new websites (up to 10 website per week)

Outcomes

• Scalable platform: Successfully deployed 460 specialized websites maintaining design and UX consistency
• Massive reach: Achieved 20 million monthly unique visitors through user-centered design and SEO optimization
• Industrialized process: Created reusable systems dramatically reducing time-to-market for new properties
• Unified brand: Established coherent identity across digital platforms and traditional media channels

Key learnings

• Systems thinking is survival: At industrial scale, every design decision must consider reusability and systematic implementation
• Constraints breed creativity: Limited resources forced elegant, scalable solutions rather than bespoke approaches
• Data grounds intuition: Balancing qualitative user insights with quantitative analytics validated design at scale
• Cross-functional partnership: Close collaboration with CTO transformed technical constraints into design opportunities

Beyond delivery: The real achievement was architecting design infrastructure that could scale from dozens to hundreds of properties while maintaining quality—proving that systematic thinking and user-centered design aren’t opposing forces.