ROLE
UX Design, UX Research, UX Lead
DESIGN TEAM
Guillaume Azadian, Louis Moncouyoux, Kelly Bignell-Asedo
YEAR
BBH/Domani, 2016-2017
CREATING A SINGULAR PLATFORM
Established in 1851, Reuters is an international news agency offering various subscription services allowing Broadcasters, Publishers, Brands, Agencies, and other content creators to receive, cite and otherwise distribute their content.
Reuters engaged us as their strategic partner to develop a new digital platform entitled Reuters Connect that would consolidate three existing platforms into one where subscribers could review, download and manage content, thereby streamlining their workflow. They also wanted to allow Reuters clients to monetize the content they create in order to grow and transform their global business.
This redesign has been a huge success for Reuters, with more and more users migrating to this new platform each day. We continue to help them expand and adjust features based on user feedback and our roadmap.
Solving the problem with the help of our users
Fully understanding the platform, issues, and needs across a wide user base was vital to build an efficient tool that would streamline workflow. Moreover, none of us ever worked in a newsroom. We had to talk to people to truly empathize with them and build a tool that they would be able to find useful.
We interviewed key stakeholders at Reuters to get an understanding of their business needs. I conducted a competitive analysis to understand the full breadth of tools our users had access to.
We also audited the existing platforms to understand what they were using and the respective features and functionality.
Some examples of the platforms we audited are as follows:
But we still couldn't put ourselves in the user’s shoes just yet. To understand the users' pain points, we interviewed a wide array of their users across the globe, including folks at The Washington Post, Nippon TV, and Mic.com. We even visited the New York Times and shadowed one of their video editors for the afternoon.
Based on what we learned about their workflows, usage, and pain points, we came up with six personas, focusing on the following three for our MVP:
Our next step was to prioritize features and build out a product roadmap. From there, we moved on to wireframes, running multiple testing sessions with their actual users to ensure we would ship the strongest product possible.
A sampling of the wireframes can be seen in this case study. If desired, I’d be happy to walk you through the larger set as I cannot post the full set here.
First round of sketches focusing on how content was gathered for use
Second round of sketches with more of a focus on how content was discovered
Wireframes from the main feed showing how content can be discovered and sourced inline
Wireframes from the filter & search flows showcasing the filters we prioritized based on frequency of use and user request
Wireframes from the story centric view that allows users to discover content
Wireframes from the registration and onboarding flow, optimized based on user feedback for speed and comprehension
Snapshot of the platform in use
Creating the Live Feed
Once we shipped the MVP, our next focus was creating the Live feed. The market for online video was booming, with the expectation to reach $121.27 billion by 2020. Tied to this is the increase in demand for live video streaming solutions.
For Reuters to compete in this arena, they had to create a Live product that could appeal to our primary personas - Traditional Broadcasters (e.g., NBC), the "New" Newspapers (e.g., The New York Times), and Digital Publishers (e.g., Buzzfeed). They wanted to have 6 streaming channels with content in a wide range of formats, from mobile streaming to broadcast quality, that is ready to be published across devices.
We had to create an interface that worked seamlessly within the platform yet delivered this Live content in a manner that was adaptable for the needs of each user type. We started by sketching the experience, then testing and increasing fidelity as we iterated. Below are some highlights of this process.
Sketches of the live feed
Wireframes of the live feed
Adding a Discovery Feed
Post-launch, we were tasked with creating an evergreen space for curated collections and discovery content.
When building the platform, we conducted two rounds of user research that highlighted content discovery. The story-centric view shared above performed well, and users were excited, noting that it would streamline their workflow when finding related content. However, once the platform launched, the ingress to the story-centric view was woefully underutilized, and users wanted more real estate for the content in the primary feed.
We separated the feed from the discovery content. Stills can be seen below, and you can see the InVision prototype here.
For me, this was my “aha moment” that made me crave more ownership, access to data, and the ability to evolve a product. If we could do this again, I would have loved to conduct a round of user research a month post-launch to identify this issue earlier on.
Reflecting on the “one stop shop”
75% of customers who previously only had access to video now regularly using photos or graphics too (meaning we successfully increased the types of content journalists are using)
58% increase in usage of Live Video since Reuters Live was launched
10% of Reuters Connect users now regularly subscribe to alerts from the planning calendar as they use our tools to plan their coverage of scheduled events
15% of content used on Connect is at least a year old – more than anticipated, meaning that the archives and the filters to surface non-recent content are important to users
Reuters has grown its original pool of 5 million pieces of content by 240%, helped by a surge in interest from news publishers in user-generated content
Reuters Connect now hosts material from 35 publishers and will increase that portfolio to 50 by the end of 2019; The platform only had 11 publishers at launch