News Design Case Study

A Mini Case Study

Part of the Racing Post's digital transformation piece, Project Janus: Redesigning news and editorial content to be more flexible, more engaging now that the Editorial team were finally able to upgrade their CMS system.

This case study will be quick and dirty, but should give you taste for the work involved.

WHAT WAS IT?

Short and quick:The editorial team were finally getting an upgraded, more modern, more flexible content CMS to help them better compete with other news organisations. The new CMS would allow for a larger breadth of content types to be published and more flexibility in how they were presented.

This work was being done alongside the larger digital transformation and rebranding work being done for the Racing Post's Project Janus.

WHY IT WAS NEEDED?

The digital news content CMS system was nearly 15 years old. The user interface was clunky, restrictive and didn't work on mobile phones - this made reporting in real time from the racetrack and the winners' circle a headache for reporters.

Also, the system did not allow or acommodate new content styles or components to be added and very limited customisation on the content styles it did have - The Racing Post news pages were looking antiquated and behind-the-times. They were having a difficult time staying competitive with Sky Sports and ITV Racing

OUTCOMES

Business impact

Pages viewed in the news areas rose by 2.6 pages per session.

Increases in revenue and engagement between news pages and racecards / race results has had a sharp increase due the introduction of data modules on article and headline pages. The introduction of context data modules led to more cross use with the integrated betting functionality.

The redesign made the news and content sections more comfortably competitive within the sports news landscape.

Organisational impact

The editorial team has much more flexibility to present different types of content and keep their audience engaged.

This flexibility led to the introduction of more innovative ways to present data, photography and video in particular, creating a richer multi-media experience.

This project established a connection between editorial, research and product design that had not existed before. It also brought UX firmly into the tooling development process as Editorial worked with a third party dev company to build the new CMS.

MY ROLE IN THIS PROJECT

Director of Product Design and User Research +

+ Service Designer

This project required me to collaborate and encourage communication across several discipines to ensure the end product was not just functional, but "usable" for the journalists and output was engaging for end users (readers)

My role involved:

Strategising with Senior Leadership, Product Management, Editorial and the third party dev company on CMS usability requirements as well as end-user content display requirements.
Leading and collaborating on producing a Service Map and phasing recommendations for new content module types
Coordinating with journalists and content creators on what they wanted to achieve with information display, audio and video handling
Directing investigative and evaluative research on new modules designed for the end user / readers
Directing internal evaluative research on the usability of the new CMS system.
Cross-departmental relationship building
Communicating and coordinating with Senior Leadership to track progress, insights and success against KPIs and other proposed metrics

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Core team I led or collaborated with:

Product designers
User researchers
Editorial operations
Journalists
Print production
Third part developers + delivery managers

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Senior leadership-level collaborators:

Chief Product Officer
Editor in Chief
Director of Engineering

REQUESTED DELIVERABLES

Complete a competitor review of other news and content organisations and compare to user research insights from current customers to assess wants and needs for both the journalists and the readers.
Collaborate with Product and Tech on how to refine the UX and visual design to work within the revised News taxonomy within the code base.
Coordinate with the third party vendor building the CMS to sequence the modules being built for release.
Create highly flexible, yet pragmatically structured modules and templates for presenting content without it all looking like a dog's dinner!
Design for how to handle: breaking news, festival specific content, photo essays, op-eds, video, audio and photo dominant content and signpost prominently subscription only content.
Also design how data, tipping and betting related modules could work within articles in such as way as to be useful and contextually relevant - the objective was to create more cross-navigation between the news area and racing data pages (e.g. race cards, horse profiles, results pages) to improve engagement metrics and encourage more interaction with Racing Post's revenue streams.