It's Election Night in America
CNN’s Election Night platform, with its precision, urgency, and clarity, offers an unparalleled experience for audiences seeking real-time results, analysis, and storytelling. Designed for a critical, high-stakes moment where trust, speed, and usability are paramount, the platform delivers a visually dynamic and data-driven layout that showcases election updates with accuracy, context, and authority.
My Approach
The 2024 CNN Election Night online experience was carefully crafted to balance the high energy of live election coverage with a disciplined, user-centered design approach. This approach was focused on blending intuitive navigation, data visualization, and editorial storytelling into a seamless, high-performing digital environment. Every element — from responsive layouts to interactive components — was designed to help users find, understand, and act on information quickly and confidently, making them feel considered and valued.
Vision and Innovation
Our vision was to set a new standard for live event coverage, redefining how primary elections are experienced online. Beyond reporting results, the goal was to create an immersive, real-time storytelling ecosystem that mirrored the depth and trustworthiness audiences expect from CNN. We integrated dynamic election results modules, innovative CMS-driven layouts, sticky navigation, and thoughtfully choreographed visual states to deliver an immediate and enduring experience, exciting our audience about the platform's capabilities.
Identifying Unique Challenges
Election Night poses unique challenges: massive real-time data loads, unpredictable traffic spikes, and the need for absolute editorial accuracy—all under intense public scrutiny. Our solution focused on modular, resilient design systems that could adapt dynamically to evolving content. We prioritized clarity over clutter, ensuring users could easily find the races that mattered most to them, no matter the device or context.
Resolving Complex Problems
Covering a national election online requires seamlessly blending breaking news, live data, and storytelling while maintaining site performance and user trust. We addressed these challenges by leveraging CMS-powered election modules, optimizing component load strategies, and designing intuitive touchpoints that made complex information digestible. Sticky scrolling ensured persistent navigation to key races, while visual hierarchies guided users from national outcomes to hyperlocal details.
User-Centric Design
At its core, we built the Election Night experience for several audience segments — whether they were a casual voter checking presidential results or a political junkie digging into down-ballot races—every layout, interaction, and visual treatment prioritized speed, clarity, and ease of use. Clean typography, responsive touch targets, and frictionless navigation helped users stay engaged and informed without feeling overwhelmed.
Meeting Audience Needs
Today’s news consumers demand more than headlines; they expect fast, trustworthy, and intuitive digital experiences that help them understand and act. CNN’s Election Night platform offers real-time updates, flexible race pages, contextual storytelling modules, and fast pathways to the news that matters most. Accessibility features and performance optimizations ensured the experience was inclusive, fast-loading, and scalable.
Detailed Pages and Features
Home: A real-time command center featuring national and key state race highlights, maps, and breaking updates.
Race Pages: Detailed breakdowns of presidential, Senate, House, and governor races, with live vote tallies and historical context.
State Hubs: Curated election coverage for individual states, offering users a focused, hyperlocal view.
Interactive Maps: Dynamic, zoomable election maps enabling exploration from national to county-level results.
Editorial Insights: Integrated reporting and explainers providing context alongside real-time data.
My Election Dashboard: A personalized hub where users can select and track specific races of interest, providing real-time updates and tailored insights throughout election night.
Navigation: Sticky and adaptive navigation to allow fast switching between different race types and geographies.
Accessibility and Performance: Fully A11y-compliant features and SEO best practices ensured inclusivity, speed, and discoverability.
Error Handling: Graceful fallback states for incomplete data or API delays, maintaining user trust and orientation.
Accessibility and Optimization
CNN’s Election Night was fully optimized for accessibility, ensuring compatibility with screen readers, keyboard navigation, and high-contrast viewing modes. In addition, it was engineered for SEO and performance, delivering rapid load times, scalable infrastructure to handle massive surges in traffic, and responsive designs that worked flawlessly across devices from mobile to desktop.
Results
CNN’s Election Night digital experience delivered significant user engagement, reach, and performance—despite the evolving digital landscape and political fatigue of 2024. While the platform is continuing to evolve, early results indicate strong validation of the redesign’s core goals:
Historic Engagement Levels: Election Day and the day after ranked as CNN Digital’s #9 and #10 highest-traffic days ever, with 67.2 million and 61 million unique visitors respectively.
Deep Time Spent Among Engaged Users: Users who visited multiple pages averaged 70 minutes on site, versus under 3 minutes for single-page visitors—highlighting the effectiveness of the design in driving exploration and retention.
Live Story as Primary Entry Point: The Election Day live story reached 48.5 million users and generated over 6.2 million hours of engagement, serving as both the largest traffic driver and a key recirculation path to the homepage and the Election Center.
Opportunities for Recirculation Growth: While 76% of visitors viewed only one page, those who visited the homepage, Election Center, and live story were significantly more likely to engage with additional content, underscoring the potential of continued UX iteration to increase cross-page journeys
Conclusion
The CNN Election Night platform was more than just a results page—it was a dynamic, trusted space where millions of users connected with the unfolding story of democracy in real time. By blending editorial excellence, user-centered design, and technical innovation, we transformed Election Night into an intuitive, immersive digital experience that set a new standard for live event coverage. This platform serves as a testament to the potential of digital news platforms, inspiring stakeholders and industry peers to push the boundaries of what's possible in online news coverage.
