Roomie is Japan's leading home lifestyle media. Entering Taiwan meant more than translating content — it meant building a reading experience that felt native to a different audience. Taiwanese readers share an affinity for Japanese aesthetics, but the visual language of the Japanese site created distance rather than familiarity. We led the full-site UX and visual design for the international Chinese edition, and stayed on for ongoing feature iteration as the product grew.
Monthly Traffic Growth +156%
Pages per Session 2.1
Challenge
How do we turn traffic readers into a habit?
The Japanese visual language felt foreign to Traditional Chinese readers. Typography scale, spatial rhythm, and pacing all needed to be rebuilt, not adapted.
Commerce had to feel like discovery, not interruption. Product placements and ad units needed to earn their place inside the reading flow.
A single article can't build loyalty. The architecture needed to move readers from one page into a broader world.
This was a localization problem. It showed up in every design decision.
Design Strategy
A magazine you can take your time with.
We rebuilt the reading experience from scratch — not adapted from Japanese. Type hierarchy, spatial rhythm, image ratio: every decision shaped one feeling — like reading at home.
Design Decisions
Built the visual language from scratch The Japanese layout felt foreign on arrival. We redefined type, spacing, and rhythm from the ground up so the site felt familiar the moment readers landed.
Embedded commerce inside the editorial flow Product recommendations appear when readers are most receptive. Purchase intent builds because the context earns it.
Cut straight to what readers care about Secondary navigation leads directly into space-based themes, reducing the distance between discovery and deep browsing.
Moved single articles into themed reading worlds Fragmented content doesn't build affinity. A curated editorial structure surfaces editors' selections as coherent themes — readers enter one article and stay inside a world.
Proposed a curation layer to make editorial taste visible We initiated curated pages to give Roomie's editorial stance a surface readers could feel. Readers sense the curation. Advertisers see the value.
Placed ad units where performance data pointed We moved inventory to the placements that drove results — visible without breaking the read.
Business Growth