Creating a subscription flow that drove record highs for the world's oldest magazine.

The Challenge

• The oldest continuously published magazine in the world needed a clearer way to sell gift subscriptions during the busiest gifting period of the year: the holiday season.
• The product requirement was straightforward, but commercially important: move users smoothly through the subscription flow while making the value, differences, and payment options of each offer immediately clear.
• That meant the gifting journey had to do more than collect checkout details. We had to think through two connected flows: the gifter, who needed to understand what they were buying, compare plans without friction, feel confident about timing and delivery, and complete the purchase with as little hesitation as possible; and the gifted recipient, who needed a clear path to receive, understand, and activate their subscription.

The Solution

I worked with the Spectator team through stakeholder alignment meetings to define and agree on the final subscription flow. That shared UX document became the foundation for my wireframe explorations and the high-fidelity, fully annotated Figma screens prepared for developer handoff.

The Process

The team began by mapping the user flows together, aligning on how the gifting journey needed to work across the gifter and gifted recipient experience. These flows became the key artefact for exploring layout, interaction, and communication hierarchy through wireframes and final UI design.

Wireframes

This is where I started working solo. I began wireframing the experience to clarify what we wanted the UI to look and feel like, without yet focusing on brand identity. This helped us align early and commit to a clear direction for layout and interaction.

UI Design

This is where I led the design effort, evolving the wireframes into high-fidelity screens that expressed the final vision for the UI and all its key states, while making sure everything was annotated, clear, and structured for the engineers.

The Outcome?

The Spectator hit record subscription highs after this flow went live: results significant enough that the magazine wrote about them in its own pages, noting more paying subscribers than at any point in its 198-year history. It was especially satisfying to see this project among the work behind that milestone.