Case Study / Follow Topic Button
Hearst Newspapers / 3 Months / Product Designer, Creative Director, Researcher
Objective: To increase email captures on site.
Challenge
Hearst Newspapers discovered that users who subscribed to newsletters were more likely to become paying customers later on, as they were more engaged and found greater value in the subscription offerings. Based on this, the team hypothesized that adding a "Follow" button, allowing users to customize their content, would boost engagement and ultimately expand the potential subscriber base.
Potential Problems
Lack of preference management with existing profile settings
Increase chance of "spam" content if a topic is large in scope
KPI’s
Increase in email captures
Solution
The approach we took was similar to how I approach the majority of product design requests and a summary is as follows:
Discovery work - We did stakeholder interviews and a SWOT analysis to understand fully the job to be done.
User Research - Understanding how the user interacted with topics was important to understand how this product implementation would work. This included unmoderated interviews to see how users behaved as well as user interviews to gauge how well people reacted to wireframes / mockups.
Strategy- After uncovering a potential user flow with how users were interacting with the page, we developed a set of characteristics that embody how the product should be used. This involved user flows, wireframes, schematics etc that set ourselves up for success in the next phase which was stakeholder feedback.
Stakeholder Feedback- After presenting these findings, we we able to show rough work to get buy in from Stakeholders. After we worked with the team, we were then able to execute the design work.
Design - In this stage we developed the Information architecture, the task diagrams, wireframes and the design comps in Figma and then created robust documentation for proper hand off to the development team.
Design Decisions
Early in the process, we needed to level set with stakeholders to ensure they were aware that this is not something that needed a "re-invent the wheel" moment. Following is already an established practice in the digital world and in order to move quickly, we needed to focus on the user experience / flow. As this was also a new product idea, spending too much time on something that could ultimately prove non-viable was another roadblock that allowed the team to focus on the experience rather than "dressing the page". Visual familiarity was important and we created a solution visually that users would recognize without too much mental heavy lifting.
Takeaways
The biggest takeaway from the project was to ensure that you have a solid foundation of research to justify design decisions that could be challenged. Newsrooms had an idea of what they wanted but the user research pointed us in a particular direction that went against what they thought was "appropriate". Therefore, rather than launching into a project with the intent to just execute on an idea, it allowed us to be more thoughtful in the execution that would align with what Users would prefer rather than what Newsrooms would prefer which would go against what the goal of the project was.