BuzzFeed Tech: 2020 Highlights

The BuzzFeed Tech Team is consistently shipping updates, launching new features, and creating entirely new products to better serve our audience. Here’s a look at just a few initiatives our Product Design team has worked on over the past few months.

BuzzFeed Shopping Gift Guides

BuzzFeed

Over the past year, COVID-19 has changed many of the ways we live, including how we shop. There’s been a necessary and large shift towards online shopping. We knew users were doing more searching, discovery, and purchasing online, and decided to build a content-driven gift guide experience to help guide users through their shopping journey. Our experience includes a robust navigation to discover gifts for all needs, products surfaced outside of article pages, sections that highlight small business, eco-friendly shopping, and minority-owned businesses, the ability to filter based on price range, recipient, category, and interest, and new illustrations.

Search on Quiz Party

BuzzFeed

We launched Search in Quiz Party to help people find the perfect quiz to take with their friends! Now you can browse popular searches like Harry Potter, Disney, Kpop (and more) to easily find quizzes you’ll love. Or just search the entire catalog of quizzes for anything else you’re interested in and invite your friends to play along!

Adjustable Serving Sizes in Tasty App

BuzzFeed

You can now adjust the serving size of any recipe in the Tasty app and see how that changes the amount of ingredients you need to make the recipe. Our audience has asked for this feature since we launched the app in order to help them make the right amount of food for their loved ones. Since launch this has become one of our most frequently used features in the app.

Flip Your Feed

BuzzFeed

We worked on a new feature on our homepage to allow users to toggle between their “regular” BuzzFeed feed and a separate feed tailored with some of our favorite content for a specific topic. We initially launched this feature in partnership with Samsung and let our users flip to a photography feed. Now the feature is available for our team or other partners to use, and we’re looking forward to other fun and specialized feeds in the future.

Tasty.co Recipe Ingredients Pages

BuzzFeed

Ever wish you could search Tasty recipes by ingredients? Thanks to our new ingredients landing page, you can do just that! The landing page showcases all ingredients that are used in Tasty recipes and gives you one central location to browse at will. Ever used Anise? How about Chickpea Flour? Ingredient pages themselves showcase all Tasty recipes that incorporate that specific ingredient.

Recommendation Queue Redesign for Social Publishing

BuzzFeed

We’ve written before about how we’re building superpowers for social publishers at BuzzFeed through our internal social publishing tools. PubHub, our social publishing tool, provides recommendations and automations to publish BuzzFeed content to various social channels. Over the past few months, we’ve taken steps to improve the features we offer our social publishers. We launched new designs for the recommendation queue to make it easier to scan the information as quickly as possible. We also added more meta information that gives our social publishers better insight to why certain pieces of content were recommended to their social channels. This has helped social publishers to save a ton of time sourcing the best content for BuzzFeed audiences on social media platforms.