NAHVERKEHR HAMBURG

Overview

NAHVERKEHR HAMBURG is Hamburg's most-read independent news portal covering mobility. It covers public transit, cycling infrastructure, sharing services, and electric mobility through news, investigations, and interviews. The platform is funded by paying subscribers.

The numbers: 2.3 million pageviews per year, around 1,000 paying Steady members, a daily Rushhour newsletter with a subscriber base in the thousands, and approximately 20,000 social media followers. I work as a freelance UX designer and developer for NAHVERKEHR HAMBURG across two areas: maintaining and extending the WordPress-based site technically, and improving the platform's user experience through systematic auditing and consulting.

My Role

The work breaks down into two areas that inform each other.

UX Work: Auditing and Consultancy: Reviewing the platform's user experience systematically, identifying friction points, conducting benchmarking against comparable media platforms, and translating findings into concrete recommendations.

Technical Work: WordPress Development and Maintenance: Maintaining the WordPress installation and building custom PHP solutions where the available plugin ecosystem doesn't meet the platform's needs, particularly around subscriber and member data management. Only a custom plugin ecosystem made it possible to get the paywall and newsletter systems to work together.

UX Work: Auditing and Consultancy

Methodology

The UX work follows a structured approach: heuristic evaluation, benchmarking against comparable platforms, and translating findings into concrete, prioritized recommendations. Results are documented and worked through together with the client.

Newsletter

The Rushhour newsletter is one of the platform's most important channels. The current UX focus of the engagement is on the newsletter: layout, readability, issue structure, and implementing a UX guide.

Website

The website UX is also part of the engagement, using the same UX guide as a basis.

Editorial Backend Experience

Part of the UX work concerns not the readers but the editorial workflow. Both plugins come with configurable admin interfaces that let the client manage key aspects directly from the WordPress backend: the membership plugin covers the full paywall CTA including copy, membership plans, button labels, and context-specific notice texts for different subscriber states; the newsletter plugin covers rotating text variants for each newsletter section and the Kurzstrecke content. Configurations that previously required editing templates or navigating third-party dashboards are accessible directly within the CMS.

Technical Work: WordPress Development and Maintenance

Maintenance

Alongside plugin development, I handle ongoing maintenance of the WordPress installation: updates, security, and general platform stability.

Custom Plugin: Paywall Integration (Steady)

The platform uses Steady as its membership and paywall service. The native Steady integration with WordPress is limited: protecting content server-side, without relying on JavaScript, requires a custom solution.

The membership plugin closes this gap. It connects Steady to WordPress via OAuth, syncs subscription status into user accounts, and controls content access server-side using a marker in the article body. Non-subscribers see a truncated version with a membership CTA that surfaces available Steady plans directly. The plugin also supports enterprise clients with access management by IP range and email domain, and provides a subscriber overview within the WordPress admin.

Custom Plugin: Newsletter System

The Rushhour newsletter runs daily and follows a consistent editorial format. For recurring elements like greetings, sign-offs, and service notes, manually writing each variant per issue would be unnecessary overhead.

The newsletter plugin handles this through a rotation system: multiple text variants can be stored for each section and are selected automatically based on the day of the week. The "Kurzstrecke" format, a collection of short news items with source references, is edited directly in the Gutenberg editor and formatted for email output by the plugin. Newsletter signups are handled through an integrated Gutenberg block that processes new subscribers via the CleverReach API.

Both plugins follow WordPress coding standards, are version-controlled, and documented.

Outcome

• Ongoing freelance engagement with a platform reaching 2.3 million pageviews annually.
• Two custom WordPress plugins in active production, closing integration gaps between the paywall service, newsletter system, and WordPress.
• Ongoing UX work on newsletter and website based on a UX guide.