Quintype

Software for newsrooms

Quintype builds the platform behind large digital publishers: the tools editors use to write, publish and run a newsroom, and the products that keep readers coming back and paying.

I spent three years and four months there. I started as a UI/UX designer on the audience products and moved into the core platform team as a senior product designer.

Metype and Subtype

My first products were the publisher-facing tools around the story:

• Metype, the engagement layer: comments, reactions and the moderation tooling that keeps them civil at high traffic.
• Subtype, the subscription layer: paywalls, plans and the subscriber journey.

Both had to work for readers and for the publisher’s own team. Moderation queues and subscription settings are dense, operational screens, and they matter as much as the reader-facing parts.

Subtype: moving login to after the purchase

The original subscription flow was tuned for the fewest steps: pick a plan, log in, pay. On paper it was short. In practice we saw a large drop-off between login and payment.

Research showed three causes:

1. Readers lost context after logging in. There was no plan confirmation, so people who came back after a break forgot which plan they had chosen.
2. Login felt unjustified. Readers didn’t see why they needed an account before they could pay.
3. Login itself failed. Wrong OTPs and signup errors ended the journey before payment.

I studied how other publishers handled it. The flows that worked told readers up front what the steps would be. My first prototype added that transparency and a plan confirmation, and it tested better with every persona. But login was still the wall. Some readers didn’t trust it, and others failed at it.

Login had one real benefit: verified contact details for follow-up. We decided that wasn’t worth the drop-off. After several rounds of exploration we moved to lazy registration: pay first, create the account after. The reader becomes a customer at the first moment of truth. The only remaining failure point was a mistyped email, so the flow confirms the email once more. After payment, an email lets the reader finish signing up in one tap, or log in later with the same address.

Bold, the flagship CMS

On the core platform team I worked on Bold, Quintype’s content management system. It is the tool editorial teams sit in all day. The work was about editorial workflows at scale: fewer clicks between draft and published, clearer states, less to remember.

A shared design system

Across Metype, Subtype and Bold, I helped build and scale a shared design system so the products felt like one platform rather than three. This is where I learned most of what I know about scale, performance-minded design, and working closely with engineers in agile teams.