HBR Website Architecture

As readers around the world consume content on a wider array of devices, including tablets and smart phones, the Harvard Business Review needed to adapt HBR.org to suit this new mobile audience. HBR began a massive redevelopment effort to make the site more user-centric and engaging across multiple platforms. The new design featured a library of UI elements to be reused throughout the site, allowing users to interact with and organize content in a personalized way. The HBR development team was looking for technical partners to help translate the redesign into a deployable site and provide holistic expertise and leadership for designing and shipping modular, performant front-end architecture.

Based on the HBR.org team's existing technology infrastructure and development environment, Bocoup designed and built a forward-looking, Web Component-ready architecture using JavaScript. This provided the HBR.org team with a simple and direct way to load UI elements selectively throughout their site. The increased modularity enabled the team to extend and test the entire library of elements in a single unified code base. Bocoup's engineers trained the team on CSS best practices and collaborative development to streamline workflows, maximize team performance, and ensure a reliable and maintainable code base. Once the site shipped, Bocoup helped the HBR.org team identify UX improvements and implement faster load times using techniques such as building and loading critical CSS.