edwinsroopakalpanakal

Edwin Fernandez

About

Resume

A redesign that

scaled across

three languages

Redesigning Dinamani — Tamil's oldest digital newsroom — for the digital era. The framework worked well enough that the parent group commissioned the same design system for their Malayalam and Kannada publications.

Viewership in Tamilnadu

Client-reported, TNIE internal data

Languages Scaled

Tamil · Malayalam · Kannada

6 mo

Project Duration

Mobile & Web

01 — ABOUT DHINAMANI

A legacy brand stuck in a

digital stalemate

Dinamani is one of Tamil Nadu's most respected newspapers — part of The New Indian Express group, with over 90 years of journalistic heritage. Its digital portal carried that legacy, but not its relevance. By the time the redesign brief landed, Dinamani was watching audience share migrate to faster, digital-native Tamil news platforms.

The brief came from the parent group with real business stakes: retain print-loyal readers as they moved online, capture younger digital-first readers, and rebuild Dinamani as a viable digital property — not just a print brand with a website attached.

CLIENT

Dhinamani - TNIE Group

ROLE

Lead UX Designer

DURATION

6 Months

DOMAIN

Digital Publishing

BUSINESS RISK 01

Audience aging out

Print-loyal readers were aging, and the digital experience wasn't bringing the next generation in. A 90-year masthead was at risk of becoming a heritage asset rather than a working publication.

BUSINESS RISK 02

Ad revenue exposure

Cluttered ad placement was alienating readers without significantly improving inventory yield. The digital monetisation model needed to support readership, not fight it.

BUSINESS RISK 02

Group-wide implications

If Dinamani's digital strategy succeeded, the framework could extend to TNIE's other regional publications. If it failed, the group's broader digital transformation slowed with it.

Design reframe: This wasn't a visual refresh — it was a strategic redesign of a legacy publication for digital relevance, with a parent group watching to see if the framework could scale across their wider portfolio.

02 — THREE STAKEHOLDERS, THREE BRIEFS

Navigating competing

requirements.

The hardest design problem on Dinamani wasn't the screens. It was holding three legitimate but conflicting briefs in tension long enough to resolve them — without letting any one stakeholder dictate the whole design.

STAKEHOLDER 01 - EDITORIAL

Content-first reading experience.

The editorial team wanted readers focused on the journalism — long-form stories breathing, hierarchy guiding attention to substance over distraction.

STAKEHOLDER 02 - MARKETING

Ad inventory that actually performs.

Marketing needed monetizable surfaces — but the existing ad density was visibly harming the reading experience. The brief was to make ads work without making the page work against itself.

STAKEHOLDER 03 - TNIE BOARD

Brand consistency with the group.

The parent board wanted Dinamani recognisable as TNIE — visual signals that connected it to The New Indian Express family, where most of their reputation lived.

HOW I NAVIGATED IT

I treated the three briefs as a sequence, not a compromise. Editorial took priority on the reading surface — story hierarchy, typographic rhythm, content-first layouts. Marketing's ad inventory was redesigned to live between editorial blocks instead of inside them — preserving revenue surfaces without breaking the reading flow. Brand consistency lived at the system level — colour, masthead, and structural cues that connected Dinamani to TNIE without forcing visual sameness onto a Tamil-language reader's context. None of the three got everything they asked for; all three got the thing that mattered most to their function.

03 — FIVE PILLARS OF DISCOVERY

Grounding the redesign in

real reader behaviour.

No invented research methods. Discovery was structured around five concrete activities, with Google Analytics carrying the empirical weight — because we had real data on how 90 years of readers actually used the site.

Google Analytics

Behavioural patterns from Dinamani's own GA — reader segments, fold-depth, exit rates, time-of-day patterns.

Editorial Interviews

Direct conversations with newsroom editors to understand reader archetypes, content priorities, and ad constraints.

Heuristic Evaluation

Systematic audit of the existing site against Nielsen heuristics — surfacing usability and accessibility gaps.

Competitive Analysis

Feature gaps across leading Tamil dailies — what they did well, where Dinamani had structural room to differentiate.

Client Collaboration

Weekly working sessions with TNIE leadership to keep the redesign anchored in business priorities, not just craft.

READER AGE DISTRIBUTION

34.2%

18-24

24.8%

25-34

17.3%

35-44

11.1%

45-54

7.5%

55-54

5.1%

65+

Key analytics insights

45%

Users only reached the 4th fold — too many ads, not enough news above the fold.

54%

Drop from article mid-read. Consistent across all categories and topics.

68%

Just want latest news. Heatmaps showed heavy clicks on top navigation only.

63%

Male readership dominates. 36% female — a growth opportunity for the platform.

04 — PERSONAS

Three readers, three

distinct needs

Built from interview insights and analytics data — these personas guided every design decision throughout the project.

Avinash Paraiyar

52 · Business Owner · Chennai

GOALS

Reads news on-the-go and shares important articles with friends and family members.

FRUSTRATIONS

Excessive ads while reading on mobile. Missing regional editions on website.

READS

Dinamalar

News 18 Tamil

The Hindu

Preethi

30 · Data Scientist · Madurai

GOALS

In-depth news daily. Listens to audio articles while working from home in the evenings.

FRUSTRATIONS

Listen-feature unreliability. Ads disrupt long-form reading sessions.

READS

Dinamalar

News 18 Tamil

NY Times

Aaditya Raghavan

33 · PE Teacher · Vellore

GOALS

Latest sports news. Scans headlines quickly and reads selectively about cricket and IPL.

FRUSTRATIONS

No dedicated sports sub-categories. Navigation lacks granularity for sports topics.

READS

Dinamalar

News 18 Tamil

TOI Channel

METHOD, STATED PLAINLY

For a news portal with millions of anonymous readers, primary user interviews weren't a realistic research method. I won't pretend they were. These three segments were built from Dinamani's own Google Analytics behavioural data, validated against editorial domain knowledge, and used as decision-making frames throughout the project. Right-sized research for an anonymous-reader product is its own discipline.

05 — PROBLEMS → OPPORTUNITIES

Mapping pain into structure

Each problem identified in discovery was paired with a concrete design opportunity — not a vague aspiration. Six pairs governed every screen-level decision.

PROBLEM 01

OPPORTUNITY

45% of readers never scrolled past the first fold — the top of the page wasn't earning attention.

→ Redesign above-the-fold as the strongest editorial surface, with clearer story hierarchy and lighter ad density.

PROBLEM 02

OPPORTUNITY

54% mid-read drop-off on long-form articles — the reading experience was breaking down before payoff.

→ Reset typographic rhythm, ad placement, and progress affordances within long-form reading.

PROBLEM 03

OPPORTUNITY

68% mobile usage — but the existing mobile experience was a shrunken desktop, not a designed mobile surface.

→ Mobile-first design system, with desktop derived from it rather than the other way around.

PROBLEM 04

OPPORTUNITY

Ad density was hurting reading without significantly improving yield — the worst of both worlds.

→ Move ads between editorial blocks, preserving inventory surfaces while protecting reading flow.

PROBLEM 05

OPPORTUNITY

Three reader segments with conflicting needs — and no design that served any of them well.

→ Build a system flexible enough to serve Segment 01's depth, Segment 02's speed, and Segment 03's modernity.

PROBLEM 06

OPPORTUNITY

No design framework — every section was its own one-off, creating maintenance debt for the editorial team.

→ Build a composable design system: components that scale across sections, page types, and eventually other publications.

06 — THE SYSTEM THAT SCALED

One design framework. Three

languages.

The composable design system built for Dinamani became the framework's biggest validation. After Dinamani shipped, the TNIE group commissioned the similar framework for their Malayalam publication (Samakalika Malayalam) and their Kannada publication (Kannada Prabha) — three different scripts, three reading traditions, one underlying design architecture.

A client deciding to invest in your framework a second and third time is a stronger signal than any single-project metric. The system worked because it was built to scale — not because anyone planned for it to scale to two more languages on day one.

தினமணி

TAMIL · DINAMANI

The original redesign

Where the system was conceived, tested, and proven. 80+ screens across mobile, web, and tablet, governed by shared components and IA principles.

സമകാലിക

MALAYALAM · SAMAKALIKA MALAYALAM

First language scale-up

Same framework, adapted for Malayalam script density and reading patterns. The group's confidence in the system was the validation that mattered most.

ಕನ್ನಡ ಪ್ರಭ

KANNADA · KANDA PRABHA

Second language scale-up

A third language confirmed the architecture wasn't tied to Tamil — it was a publishing system that happened to start in Tamil.

METHOD, STATED PLAINLY

We have chosen Noto Sans for the entire projects. A Google font which provides clean, harmonious, and highly readable digital experience for the Tamil script.

Line height of 150% for headings, 160% for body copy for the Mobile App. It varied for the Website from 140% to 130% respectively. Though Malayalam and Kannada had a different line height due to the round character of the font.

SYSTEM PRINCIPLE 01

Composable, not bespoke

Every section was built from shared components — story cards, headline blocks, ad placements, navigation patterns. The same atoms recomposed for Home, Category, Detail, and Search.

SYSTEM PRINCIPLE 02

Script-aware, not script-locked

The system was designed assuming the script could change. Tamil's higher character density, Malayalam's curved character set, and Kannada's reading rhythm could each be accommodated without rebuilding components.

SYSTEM PRINCIPLE 03

Editorial-first, ad-respectful

Components were structured so editorial content sat in the visual foreground, with ad inventory living in dedicated between-block surfaces — never inside reading flow.

07 — COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

Feature gaps across Tamil

dailies

Analysed direct and indirect competitors to identify differentiation opportunities — the question driving this exercise was "how can we push the boundaries?

A Comprehensive competitor study has been conducted to find the feature gaps, structure, advertisements and campaigns.

Features

Category Navigation

Mobile-Friendly Design

Search

Listen to Article

Dark Mode

Live Streaming

Personalization

District-wise News

Mobile App

Podcast/Audio

Stories

Short videos

Benhmarks

DAILY THANTHI

DINAMALAR

THE HINDU TAMIL

NEWS 18 TAMIL

MATHRUBHUMI

THE GUARDIAN

TIMES OF INDIA

MALAYALA MANORAMA

SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST

THE NEW YORK TIMES

08 — INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE & DESIGN

From research to

structured design

Robust IA for home and category pages translated seamlessly into precise wireframes. Inspired by South China Morning Post, The Guardian, The Times, and Mathrubhumi.

Redesigned Home Page IA

Reorganised 35+ sections into a streamlined hierarchy with strategic ad placement following Google best practices.

Navigation & Categories

Main News Carousel

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