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.
TIMELINE
03/2019: 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 ORGANISATION
Editions Huddle
Editorial department
Apps
Ophan (metrics)
Editorial tools
User help
Acquisitions
Retention
Subscriptions & contributions
Digital reader revenues
Brand & Awareness
Oliver (in-house marketing agency)
L to R: Redesign of the article templates. Standard (news), standard (sport), review, opinion, interview, analysis and immersive templates
4) Scrolling and swiping are established navigation behaviours that will be easily understood by readers.
→ We want to design the app in a way that it feels native to digital users, not a literal adaptation of a physical product online.
Early prototype of the front card system and the slider, where navigation is done by swiping and scrolling.
→ RESEARCH
4 rounds of research between August 2018 and July 2019
1) 800 digital pack subscriber survey to understand reader motivations and validate product proposition
2) 7 reader interviews to understand news consumption and explore new designs
3) 15 sessions of user testing
4) Survey to +1,500 users to validate product proposition
Slider prototypes tested
→ HYPOTHESES
1) There is an appetite for a finite way of consuming news.
→ Some readers are overwhelmed by the constant updating of news. Publishing once a day will allow them to read at their own pace and continue with the rituals created with physical newspapers.
2) Readers want to be able to read past editions.
→ Readers want to be able to go back and read certain sections on different days of the week. this is especially accurate for the Saturday supplements that focus on food, books and lifestyle.
3) We don’t need to structure content in the same way as the physical newspaper.
→ Making sense of the product in a separate way to the print version will enable us to reach markets where the print version isn’t available. For example, calling out the content from the G2 supplement separately might only make sense to UK readers whilst everyone will understand “lifestyle” and “culture”.
→ RESEARCH TAKEAWAYS AND INSIGHTS
Product proposition: needs clarifying
→ For current users, the Daily Edition (DE) offered a completely different experience from the app and the website, and they loved this.
→ There was a need to add clarity to product positioning with Editions as well as the relationship with the premium app and overall Digipack.
Navigation: tweaking required
→ Readers expected the sliders to be interactive rather than just informative.
→ They liked the feel of navigating a paper, but the convenience of being able to select the sections most important to them.
Content structure: 95% clear
→ There was a lack of clarity around the front page, especially around the section called “Top stories”, which was meant to be like the physical newspaper’s cover page.
Navigation: tweaking required
→ Readers expected the sliders to be interactive rather than just informative.
→ They liked the feel of navigating a paper, but the convenience of being able to select the sections most important to them.
Content structure: 95% clear
→ There was a lack of clarity around the front page, especially around the section called “Top stories”, which was meant to be like the physical newspaper’s cover page.
Design: bold choices are great
→ Participants loved the bright, bold new design of the DE and considered it an improvement to the previous look&feel.
→UI SOLUTION
THE CARD SYSTEM
We started by creating a card system:
→ Based in the scroll and swipe navigation pattern, validated through user testing.
→ That would enable the DE to be consistent across all screen sizes.
→ That would allow for flexibility in the number of stories included in each section.
The magic (and curse) of digital design. Solutions need to work across endless screen sizes and multiple orientations.
A card system allows for flexibility in the amount of stories we can include
Before (2014 design)
MVP (October 2019)
→ OUTCOME
→ Digital reader revenues grew well between May 2019 and April 2020 - with recurring contributions and digital subscriptions (boosted by the launch of the Daily app) each growing at more than 20%. With 340,000 one-off contributions, 1.16 million people supported the Guardian in some way.
→ There was an 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.
→ 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).
→ SECONDARY USERS: THE PRODUCTION DESK
Because each Daily Edition is curated and updated once a day, we had to think not only about the app code and our readers but also the production process. What is the most sustainable way to produce it?
We decided to leverage the tool we use to curate our home and section fronts’ pages: Fronts tool.
This tool would allow the production desk to:
1) Curate the content and publish the editions.
2) Customise headlines in a more print-style way (since we don’t need to worry about SEO).
We also created a new ad-hoc tool that would them to customise the imagery of cover cards without relying on designers and is fully integrated with our image tool: Grid.
Early version of cover card builder tool, which includes guides for cropped areas on different mobile sizes.
→ ACCESSIBILITY
It’s key to remember that we should have accessible products for internal users just as much as for readers.
Headlines and standfirst need to be legible at all times, including cover cards. But what if one of our production editors is colour blind? Maybe orange headlines have enough contrast for them but for non-colour blind readers, they become hard to read in 90% of times.
We solved this challenge by created an internal guide, training the team and adding labels to our tool so the production team didn’t have to rely on colours solely.
Things aren’t always right the first time.
User-centric design means there is no such thing as a finished app.
AFTER LAUNCH
L: MVP slider, R: improved navigation, bigger standfirst size and share feature.
HUDDLE TEAM
Director 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
Guardian readers are very passionate and attached to the products and have no issues in letting us know how they feel about them. By having someone from user help embedded within the huddle, we were able to incorporate issues and bugs every day at stand up and prioritise the fixes:
→ Adding rich links - how to navigate from the daily to other guardian content
→ Adding share icons (we launched the MVP without)
→ Changed the navigation slider to be clearer and improve orientation.
→ Tweaked the cover card system to be showcase news more condensed (and change the perception that the Guardian Daily had less news than the print version when, in fact, it was the other way around).
