A new news & lifestyle experience

🕐 min read

How a small cross-functional team created an engaging and profitable house porn experience

Samples of the final designs. In related news I love the phrase 'House Porn' and use it way too often

Overview & role

In early 2016 I joined a team of 4 engineers and a product manager as the lead UX & Visual designer looking to improve our News, Insights & Lifestyle content experience.

Our primary goal was to improve engagement with our content, offer new mutimedia opportunities and optimise the experience for mobile. Our ultimate goal was the rabbit hole effect: an immersive frictionless browse experience for home lovers.

Problem & opportunity

Reviewing metrics for our News section we identified some issues with the mobile experience, namely with articles per user, time on site and scroll depth. This indicated challenges around both the content and the mobile experience.

Put together an analysis of the current experience, compared with other similar news and content experiences

We also poured over the analytics, key demographic information and target audience

And of course we talked to a lot of users

We also interviewed early stage home buyers (known as "dreamers") and folks who identified as being interested in lifestyle and browsing content. Common feedback was that it was more difficult to find the content they liked and it was rarely relevant when they visited.

I'm in Melbourne, I don't want to see articles about Sydney mansions when I can't afford it & don't live there - Property news reader

Ideation & concepts

I also created a project wall which included our key metrics, current engagement numbers, a large mood board capturing the key themes. We also included examples of other news & content sites along with some samples of nice visual treatments we wanted to consider.

Mood boards are a great way to capture key themes and concepts in a visual way. In this case a 10 foot window.

Just check a few links on my phone for something to do. I just love photos. - Property news reader

I lead a whole day workshop with the entire team to explore ideas and agree on something to validate with users in person within a week. The team produced a number of sketches we grouped then using red dots identified core functions and experiences. I quickly turned these in to wireframes and basic prototypes in Invision.

Everything mobile prime, mobile first.

We sketched out content flows and created a framework for what content mapped to different user journeys

A lot of sketching and explorations, meeting notes in sketch form and gathering ideas from our cross-functional team

Prototype & testing

We tested a number of key concepts with users including:

Consistent hierarchy with prominence for media (photos, video)
A new swipable photo gallery near the top
Truncating the content with a Read more toggle
Relevant similar content panels immediately below the toggle
A new video component with thumbnail playlist
Some shiny new media placements to test user tolerance

A key consideration was how the content mapped to our broader family of News Corp publications, but also to create both a locale (state) based heirarchy and a theme/topic based one

Wireframes were printed and put on the wall in our area. We invited colleagues and stakeholders to come and provide feedback and insights by writing on sticky notes

All five of the concepts were either accepted by users or they had no objections to them. Our research team also ran a study on the most popular content which we promoted in the experience.

Confident we were on the right path the team started building the backend and interface whilst I iterated on the experience.

Visual design

We wanted to make the photos bigger and make the content easy to read so typography, font sizes and white space were paramount. REA has an extensive UI library but we took the opportunity to give the experience more of a traditional news feel whilst remaining contemporary for a digital medium.

We looked at several serif typefaces for key headings and content, in addition to being the voice of our brand. A monospace font was also added for data and labels whilst we retained our brand sans-serif font for body copy.

The goal was to as visual as possible: lean in on the photos make it easy to scan

In the overall hierarchy we felt the need to run a couple of paragraphs then multimedia

Impact & results

After three months of working in our cross-functional team we went live with the new news experience and the results were immediate:

20% Pages / UU Average user read 20% more articles with the new experience

14 Swipes Users swiped through an average of 14 photos in the new mobile media gallery

Video Up 10% Video views increased by 10% with the new video carousel

25% Traffic Increased traffic month over month

Including some heatmaps of user engagement with our new experience, as well as examples of our media placements which would go on to be highly profitable for the company, rolled out across our photo galleries on mobile to be a multi-million-dollar product.