Make your users’ experience as easy as possible; if you frustrate them, they will leave.
You’re reading the My News Biz newsletter, which we send every other Thursday. Our goal is to help digital media entrepreneurs find viable business models.
This week our guest collaborator is David LaFontaine. He is a Lead UX designer and problem-solver who bridges the divide between the creative and business sides of organizations. He has consulted with media around the world on digital design and development, multimedia content creation, and web analytics, among many other specialties.
What is it? UX Design creates a user’s experience (UX) with a product. It’s one of the key reasons that some users are only “one-and-done” with a product while others build unshakeable loyalty and even evangelize to recruit new users into the fold.
Why Should I Care? News organizations are not just in competition with other publishers; they’re fighting for attention from all the other digital content outlets — all of which spend a great deal of time and effort on crafting their user experience.
How Can I Use It? Improving UX does not have to mean a ground-up redesign; the best of the leading social media and entertainment giants are in a constant, ever-evolving phase of continuous improvement. Even small, incremental improvements in UX can pay off in increased loyalty (and revenues!).
Part 1 of 2: Table Stakes for Digital Publishers
Jakob Nielsen is one of the founders of user-experience (UX) design thinking, and he has a pithy reminder for publishers who still have lingering attitudes towards their audience’s attention.
Jakob’s Law: Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know. Users will transfer expectations they have built around one familiar product to another that appears similar.
If you’re not paying attention to the changes in the way that digital products and content are being consumed, you risk being completely — perhaps fatally — out of step with what your audience is used to and is already demanding.
My professional evolution from newspaper reporter, editor, and investigative journalist to UX Designer has called upon a lot of the core skills that journalism school drummed into my head.
But one of the hard lessons I’ve had to learn along the way has been that the internet fundamentally upends the power dynamic between content creators and consumers. The People Formerly Known As The Audience have infinite choice at their fingertips. Every book, song, or movie, ever made. Anywhere in the world. Instantly.
That power of choice means that our users can bounce, lightning fast, from an experience that doesn’t suit their wants, needs, and desires — to one that does.
Design is about more than just making things look pretty. UX Design concerns itself with making the experience of using a product or service as easy, pleasant, and rewarding as possible. Designers throw around buzzwords like “elegant” or “graceful” or “delightful” to describe things that just feel good, that strike the invisible tuning forks inside us, to make us want more.
It’s redundant and somewhat old-fashioned to note that digital media is fast-evolving. But there are some design principles that have come to the fore in 2024 that affect your audience’s expectations.
Part 1 of this guest-post centers around the “Table Stakes” for publishers. These are design considerations that you absolutely must be thinking about, if not already engaging with.
Each of these design trends has a different meaning and impact in the world of enterprise-level software, so I have customized them to make them more relevant for the news industry.
- Big Data. Both internally and externally focused.
(Image generated using Adobe Firefly)
While it is now common for newsrooms to have big monitors bolted to the walls or ceilings that display up-to-the-minute traffic numbers, to truly find the valuable insights lurking inside the data, publishers are going to need to dive deeper inside the analytics.
This data needs to intersect with design to help refine content strategy. If you are expending significant resources to create stories, podcasts, videos, infographics, etc., that nobody really pays attention to … then the question is not just “Why?” but also “How do you plan to stay in business?”
Basic traffic data and why it matters:
- Bounce Rate — this number displays how many users hit your site or product, look around and then say, “Nope” and leave. Caveat: this may be because your site is exceptionally good at providing them exactly what they need — perhaps the answer to “Who hit the 2nd-most home runs in the NL West in 1993?” But generally speaking, a high bounce rate is not a good thing, as it means that your audience isn’t really seeing anything else that interests them.
- Time Spent — a close corollary to a high bounce rate is low time spent on your site. Unless you’re appealing to speed-readers, keep an eye on how long people spend looking at your content.
- Unique Visitors — Google Analytics breaks out people who are coming to your site for the first time (in a set time period, usually a month), and those who keep coming back again and again. Both are important, for different reasons. A sudden influx of Uniques far above your regular traffic means you just hit on a story that’s bringing in new users. Steady growth in Returning Users means that people are making it a habit to check out what you are producing.
- Traffic Source — this is usually broken out into whether people are coming:
- Direct, meaning they have either typed in your URL or bookmarked your site. Either one means you have a user who is familiar enough with you so that they can spell your name right, or they have a link in their browser that they click on to go right to you.
- Organic Search, otherwise known as “the results of good SEO.” A lot of traffic arriving this way means that your stories are showing up in search results.
- Referral, which is links from other sites to your content. These are potentially good partners to reach out to, since they seem to be responding to what you’re putting out there.
- Social, which is exactly what it sounds like. Links from Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc.
Going Beyond The Basics
Every publisher needs to at least engage with the basic page traffic data explained above to get an idea of what their audience is interested in. The following data points are ones that are important to take the next step:
- Paths — are what they sound like. The succession of pages that a site visitor clicks through as they navigate around your site. A usual User Path has a new visitor arriving at a story via search, and then getting interested in some of the other stories or content links publishers have integrated into the site. Look for a common Exit Page. Is there a particular page on your site that is just fatal for user engagement? If people are hitting on a particular piece of content and then saying “Ugh! No thanks, I’m outta here!” Maybe it might be good to either take it down or figure out what’s making people leave.
- Events — are actions that users take while on your site or app, such as playing a video, downloading a PDF, scrolling deeper into a multimedia creation, signing up for a newsletter, etc. It used to require specialized knowledge and JavaScript code to wire up a website to record in-page actions. But that functionality is increasingly baked in to the latest iteration of Google Analytics 4. (Shameless plug: I created an entire class to help creatives update their analytics on Pluralsight, if that is something you need help with.)
- Lifetime Value — is a metric that has become supremely important with e-commerce marketers, political campaigns, and smart publishers who rely on donations and membership models to fund their news organizations.
- Engaged Sessions per User — this tells you the percentage of your audience who are actually doing things on your news site. As we will get to in just a bit, the paradigm of just having a passive audience that sits there and lets your information wash over them is gone. Forever.
Externally focused Big Data
The stories news organizations cover are increasingly complex, and require journalists to be able to acquire, normalize, and analyze large and complex datasets.
Stories about infrastructure spending, climate change, how demographic shifts affect political races, and whether the availability of library books leads inevitably to social chaos are just a few of the themes where data analysis is an essential tool.
- AI: Design and content force multiplier
(GIF from the movie “I, Robot” that featured this climactic battle scene of robots versus humans. Courtesy of Giphy and 20th Century Fox)
Many journalists have the attitude that we are in a life-and-death war against Artificial Intelligence, as it is coming to take all our jobs. The fears of a godlike AI arising and turning into Skynet from The Terminator are still, luckily, overblown.
In the meantime, using artificial intelligence and machine learning to take over repetitive drudge-work from journalists is starting to catch on, even in small newsrooms, down at the local level. Two good steps: using AI to transcribe the audio of city council or school board meetings or to help personnel-strapped newsrooms to cover high school sports games that they otherwise would have missed.
(Image generated using Adobe Firefly)
AI can also be used to do basic proofreading on articles or to generate illustrations to accompany news articles (as was done using Adobe Firefly above, and elsewhere in this article).
From a pure design perspective, companies like Cover Rocket (full disclosure: I have worked as a consultant for the owner), offer galleries of AI-generated magazine covers and potential headlines for editors and publishers to choose from or to use to spark creativity. (An AI headline writing experiment.)
Please note that I am in no way advocating for removing humans from all content-generating functions and just using unmonitored robots to crank out low-effort stories, art, podcasts, or (eventually) videos.
That’s what the spammers do.
Instead, the “creatives” who hope to not just survive, but flourish, are learning how, when, and where to use AI to enhance what they do. It is by no means a clean, predictable process. But then again, neither was learning how to use social media platforms. And by now we all understand at least a little about how to use Twitter, yes?
AI is not going to replace humans. Even the most sophisticated Large Language Models (LLMs) — like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Twitter’s Grok, or any of this ever-growing list — lack the context, and the humanity, to be able to independently create a story that emotionally resonates with our audiences.
Instead, AI with human supervision can be a force-multiplier. It can empower journalists to collect and analyze vast amounts of information quickly and then surface those choices in a content channel (text, audio, video, art) that best reaches the people most interested in that information.
- Intentional personalization that creates a feeling of intimacy — but not creepiness
Personalizing user experiences is a high-risk/high-reward design trend. We’ve all seen the stories about invasive cyber-surveillance that have generated so much outrage (and billion-dollar court judgments) over the last decade. Under the guise of providing “a more personalized advertising experience,” platforms like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, etc., have collected every scrap of data available about our likes, dislikes, and secret obsessions that they can. And then they’ve sold it off to the highest bidder.
Don’t do that.
Instead, carefully craft the kind of experiences that create affinity by making your audience feel like you pay attention to what they like — and don’t — and that you are trying to be helpful, not manipulative.
HELPFUL: A news site covering health care that surfaces a pop-up or other notification on the screen to an individual user that says, “We’ve noticed you’ve been browsing for articles about ways to preserve joint health. We have a collection of articles by physical therapists that you might find interesting, as well as these reviews that rate the best medications or braces. Our other readers have contributed their opinions as well in these user forums that you might find interesting. Click here to check it out, or click here to turn off our recommendations.”
UX Designers have found that one of the keys is to give your audience control over their options. Again, people don’t like to feel manipulated.
CREEPY: The same health-care news site, instead of surfacing a polite pop-up message that lays out the how, what, and why, instead changes the entire content mix of the front page of the site to be all about expensive ankle or knee braces, with affiliate links that pay money to the site for sending traffic their way.
- Inclusivity in your content — not just in your newsroom
In the wake of the George Floyd protests and the “Me Too” movement, the past few years have seen a heightened awareness of diversity and inclusion in newsrooms and content coverage areas … as well as a fierce backlash.
I won’t be addressing the various issues around diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) in personnel decisions, but instead on how to widen inclusivity beyond just the faces in your newsrooms.
One of the recurring themes designers are grappling with in e-commerce and enterprise-level goods and services is the growing appetite on the part of our users to collaborate with the brands they love, to co-create things that fit their needs, wants and quirky senses of humor. City governments in the U.K. and the U.S. have long sought ways to get their constituents engaged, finding success with holding online contests to vote to name things. Chicago playfully named its new snowplows “CTRL+SALT+DELETE” and “Bad, Bad, Leroy Plow” and dubbed an escaped alligator who lurked in a local pond as “Chance the Snapper,” a play on local music legend Chance The Rapper.
Taco Bell was recently named one of the “Most Innovative Companies in the World” by Fast Company magazine for doing things like including suggestions from fans of their food to create entirely new menu items — even when the process spiraled out of control in ways that make traditional Brand Managers reach for antacids:
That brand-to-fan conversation began in earnest in 2022, with Doja Cat’s famous Mexican Pizza tweet. The resulting campaign was a hit, primarily due to Doja Cat’s complete lack of formality. She talked constantly to her followers about the partnership, openly complaining about having to write a jingle on social media, and leaked a Super Bowl spot. “We allowed Doja to be Doja and that had a real impact on creating genuine connections with fans,” Tresvant told me at the time, describing the feeling of “relinquishing control and trusting the process and the partner. That can be hard,” he admitted, but “you can see the payoff.”
The payoff for news organizations would not just manifest in an increased level of reader attention, interest, and affinity, but also in increasing the diversity of perspectives and the coverage areas.
Years ago, when social media was first starting to get traction, it became fashionable for pundits and newsroom managers to say of user-generated content that “The newsroom just got a lot bigger.” An early positive example happened at the Bakersfield Californian’s experimental local social media platform, “Bakotopia.” Matt Muñoz, a local music promoter, walked into the offices one day, hoping to build a partnership to reach fans, and wound up being an editor for the next decade.
Unfortunately, the initial optimism around including our audiences into our journalism foundered as journalists were subjected to stalking, trolling, and other forms of online abuse, and learned to fear interactions with readers/listeners/viewers.
Into that void stepped “Influencers,” with their Internet-native instincts, thick skins, and knack for energizing their followers to evangelize for their content. The ultimate effect was seen recently at the International Symposium for Online Journalism, where the increasingly blurred lines between “Influencers” and journalists was on full display. Journalists are leaving (or being laid off from) traditional media outlets and starting their own social media influencer channels at the same time that influencers are starting to do more journalism.
Among the crucial practices that influencers do to make their followers feel included, are:
- Adding segments to the end of videos or podcasts that detail how the content was produced
- Calling out individual audience members for their contributions or story ideas
- Consistently pushing out new content on a predictable schedule so audience members know when to tune in
- Being transparent about how a story makes the reporter feel, and what they went through emotionally while researching and producing the news
- Integrating audience submissions into the content that is produced
- Empowering audience members to cooperate with each other, if they are motivated to chase down leads or do “legwork” research on their own.
Next time: Table Stakes Part 2 will share three more user-experience (UX) design trends that newspaper publishers need to know about.