Creating a new content experience to introduce readers to The Times
While working on onboarding new free users, I realized we didn’t have a good way to package some of our “best of” content to show readers the breadth and depth of The Times.
I started exploring ways to solve this as a side project, and eventually created a reusable template to fill this need.
Setting the Stage
If you’ve read The New York Times, you’ve probably seen some of our unique interactive journalism. Or maybe you read a modern love story that stuck with you for years. Some of these stories live on in the collective memory, but many get lost in our archives once a few months have passed. I wanted to find a way for us to create curated collections of stories to introduce new readers to the breadth of The Times.
Early explorations
At first, I was playing around with approaches that maintain the dense visual style of the rest of the Times product. This didn’t feel quite right to me. It compressed the projects and stories together too much, and felt taxing to explore. I wanted an experience that would more closely mirror the immersive feeling of many of our special interactive projects.
Exploring more immersive visuals for different content types
I started exploring ways to bring various stories, projects to life. I also began incorporating some of our other digital products like Cooking and Games, and began to realize that this surface could do the work of introducing our full digital product suite.
Desktop
Mobile
I explored many approaches embedding our games or showing multiple types of game, podcast, or recipe per card. Ultimately we had to simplify much of that functionality. User testing also lead us to conclude that simple cards were most appealing to users.
User testing
During “Maker Week” (internal week for innovation) my team and I did some user testing with this surface. At the same time, I worked with an engineering friend to build a quick proof of concept in browser.
I selected all the content for these prototypes, with an eye towards breadth and compelling visuals.
Findings
Simple mobile cards were much more appealing to users than the desktop designs (above)
There is rising ‘bad news’ fatigue, with COVID-19 in the news for months. Participants expressed a desire to step back from some of the more alarming / negative news.
“I’m interested” was an appreciated low-commitment way to control their experience. Users hoped for increasing personalization of this surface based on their inputs. Users also wanted to be able to indicate which topics they don’t want to see.
Successfully demonstrates value of the product: By the end of the experience, at least half of participants wondered aloud why they had not subscribed and resolved to do so, especially at $1/week.
Simplifying and standardizing the template
I simplified the template based on user testing feedback, and to facilitate building an MVP of this surface. The card templates would allow us to build out a collection that highlights sections or specific articles.
how it’s built
I worked with my engineering partner to identify which values should be editable in the template. Using a google sheet to control the content, I’m able to update the card content, format, skrim values over the images, background color, and image focus on my own without engineering help.
Use cases for this new tool
01 - Persuasion Test
We used this tool to test whether including some persuasion architecture at the moment of conversion might improve outcomes. Users were able to click “Get a sneak peek” next to a “subscribe” link. For this test, the template language was geared towards convincing users to subscribe. Conversion rates in the Welcome variant improved by 10%. We also saw that users responded much more positively to lifestyle content.
02 - Free Trial Onboarding
We ended up using this tool as part of onboarding to a free trial of our digital bundle.