Cracked Windows 8 Reader App

Challenge

As Cracked’s audience continued to grow larger, so did its brand recognition. This opened the door to many different opportunities for the property. In the summer of 2012, Cracked was approached by Microsoft to see if they were interested in having an app be pre-installed as part of the new “Windows 8”operating system they were working on at the time. The only catch is they needed it to be ready to ship in 2 weeks.

Solution

As the lead product designer, I led the design effort for Cracked.com's Windows 8 application.  Learning Microsoft’s new design system “Modern UI” or “Metro” Design Language ( this was previous to their “Fluent” Design System ) and their design guidelines in such a short amount of time was a fun challenge. I worked in a small team with the lead engineer and product manager to tackle the user flow and created a set of low fidelity mockups on the fly during those meetings. Once I knew exactly what pages / screens needed to be designed, I created high fidelity mockups to send to Microsoft for approval. I also created a basic design system consisting of fonts, color schemes and card templates for the development team to use as reference. The design ultimately consisted of a “hub” page which is similar to an overview or homepage, “section” pages which were the second level pages, followed by “detail” pages which were the end nodes in the navigational hierarchy. Working side by side with our engineer team leader, we were able to get the app launched before the tight deadline.