Jono Lee
Audience Engagement

Disqus

Lead Product Designer / 2012 - 2016

I worked on nearly everything while at Disqus and helped lead a team of designers. Here are a few highlights.

Marketing Redesign (2016)

Marketing

I led the redesign of Disqus’ marketing pages to help better reflect the current state of the product. In particular, Disqus was no longer just comments, but an entire audience network that helps bring both engagement and ad revenue to publishers.

I worked cross functionally with the marketing team, other designers including an illustrator, and the executive team to figure out the content and requirements. From there, I iterated on the design a few times based on feedback and finally helped implement the pages in code.

Publisher Admin Redesign (2015)

Admin

With new features continually added over the years, the admin our publishers used was beginning to show its age. In particular, the information architecture and grouping of features were often confusing as new controls were stuffed into areas that didn’t always 100% make sense.

I led a redesign to modernize the admin and make it easier for publishers to access the features and workflows they needed, on top of adding a new concept of “organizations” that controlled multiple sites.

Design System (2015)

I led the creation of a Bootstrap style design system implemented using SASS. With style guidelines and reusable components, it became easier to scale a consistent UI across the product for the front end team.

Sidebar (2014)

Sidebar

Born out of a hackathon, I designed and developed a new slide out sidebar for commenters to quickly access popular features, like notifications and user profiles, from anywhere they see Disqus comments. The goal here was to unify what we were building on Disqus.com and what people were seeing in the commenting embed, providing a consistent UX across the board.

Explore (2013)

Explore

I prototyped a visual way of exploring content and discussions on the vast Disqus network. The proof of concept was built using existing API endpoints and other “off the shelf” components. Responsive down to mobile.

Promoted Discovery (2012)

Promoted Discovery

My first team at Disqus was tasked with building up a content advertising business from the ground up that became Disqus’ largest source of revenue. I designed a flexible grid that worked at any width with our commenting embed, while containing a combination of text and images. I also helped create internal tools and dashboards for our operations team to manage campaigns and publishers.

Other Work