Guardian Daily
Native apps Visual design
The Guardian, UK
The newspaper, straight to your phone, every morning at 6am.
It’s March 2019, the House of Commons has rejected not once but twice Theresa May’s EU withdrawal agreement, Billie Eilish has released “When we fall asleep”, and “Knives Out” has just landed in cinemas.
The Guardian is looking to break even by reaching £2M supporters by 2022 and growing global reader revenues.
The strategy? Expand our product portfolio offer and redesign the Guardian daily app so it’s not just available on iOS tablets but also on mobiles and Android.
The goal is to re-design a well-loved product in a modern way that showcases our trusted and ground-breaking journalism, offers a clear different proposition to the live app…
… and keeps our current users happy. Not an easy task.
Before (2014 design)
MVP (October 2019)● Business needs
Increase revenue by making the app also available for mobile devices and Android platforms.
The launch date should be Q3 2019.
● User insights
Reading the news once a day feels less overwhelming that a constant flow of news. But it’s not always clear to users what the difference is between the Daily and the Live app. The UX and UI had to solve this challenge.
Readers liked the feel of navigating a paper, but the convenience of being able to select the sections most important to them.
● Design
The idea of the newspaper once a day is the opposite of new. But we wanted the app to look and feel native to digital platforms.
● Production
When designing the app we had to carefully consider what the process of editing each issue worked.
The production desk sits in the editorial department, uses curation tools “owned” by another team and is under a tight to put these together between 6pm and 2am.
The end design had to consider the tooling available for the production desk and its limitations.
● Delivery
Built using React in record time, close collaboration across the team huddle was critical.
We also had to consider historical decisions on tech infrastructure and APIs. The Guardian is quite complex in that regard and we required support across the organisation.
● Results
We successfully managed to retain 91.8% of the customers acquired during our first acquisition peak on the 1st week after launch (data from May 2020).
Recurring contributions and digital subscriptions (boosted by the launch of the Daily app) grew over 20%. With 340,000 one-off contributions, 1.16 million people supported the Guardian in some way.
Increase of the digital subscription base who use the Daily every day to 30% by May 2020.
At the end of March 2020 we had over 820,000 recurring supporters for the Guardian around the world, a 23% increase on the previous year.
Churn was in line with provisions.
TIMELINE03/2019: Project kick-off
10/2019: Marketing launch on iOS and Android
10/2019: Kick-off of Phase 2 (expansion to AUS market)
TEAMS INVOLVED ACROSS THE ORGANISATIONEditions Huddle
Editorial department
Apps
Ophan (metrics)
Editorial tools
User help
Acquisitions
Retention
Subscriptions & contributions
Digital reader revenues
Brand & Awareness
Oliver (in-house marketing agency)HUDDLE TEAMDirector of Digital Reader Revenues: Juliette Laborie
Senior Delivery Manager: Huw Prior
Head of Digital subscriptions and Membership: Charles Minty
Group Product Manager: David Blishen
Agile Scrum Manager: Shraddha Pande
Engineering Manager: Luke Taylor
Engineering: Philip McMahon, Laura González, Richard Beddington, Alex Ware
Design: Alex Breuer, Ben Longden, Ana Pradas
UX Design & Research: Paul Lamey, Shermaine Waugh, Priscilla Melo, Gustavo Gava
Editorial Production: Katy Vans
Digital Marketing Manager: Sherri Jordan
User Help Manager: Andrew Findlay