newmatilda.com serves up Australia’s most progressive analytical writing, satire and illustrations, and represents the kind of independent media that is vital to a healthy democracy. newmatilda.com came to Digital Eskimo wishing to redesign the website from the ground up, including an upgrade to a new content management system. The management team made a bold decision to move from a subscription model to an advertising-supported model prior to our engagement, enhancing the need for us to increase the time spent on site and page views dramatically.
Outcomes
In the resulting design, reader participation is given much higher prominence and the centrality of discussion and contributions by the community around articles is highlighted. User comments and views drive the interaction on the site via a What’s Hot algorithm that takes into account comment frequency, views, date published and other factors. This feature was created both for its value to the end user and to reduce the need for What’s Hot editorial work from the small newmatilda.com team. The resulting functionality means the website responds to user behaviour in real-time.
Contributors also gained a much higher profile to enhance the importance of the mainly volunteer writing community that makes newmatilda.com possible. Strong support for RSS and other social media tools ensures the content has the widest distribution possible, and that readers can easily share and disseminate articles. RSS was seen as particularly critical for newmatilda.com’s important news/web savvy media audience segment who often use these methods to access large volumes of news content rather than visiting actual sites.
Since the launch of the new site, newmatilda.com readers reported a major increase in site usability and the overwhelming response from the audience was extremely positive. Readership numbers have skyrocketed, with newmatilda.com regularly receiving just shy of 4,000 unique visitors per day and newsletter subscriptions doubling in the first year of the redesign alone to over 10,000 subscribers.
Engagement has steadily increased from launch with the current (as of March 2010) average time on site over 7 minutes and average page views at 2. After launch the website also saw a dramatic reduction in bounce rates which has remained well below previous bests and a continuously increasing readership which now approaches 100,000 per month.
Challenges
newmatilda.com needed to extend its reach and increase incidental traffic to the site, ensuring an engaging user experience once there. The site’s community of readers are renowned for being outspoken and passionate, and the re-design had to be handled with sensitivity, especially when it came to advertising and content balance. The move to an advertising-based revenue model also presented a major technical and cultural shift within newmatilda.com itself.
Design Strategies
Starting with our in-depth Scoping process, we mapped the experience of the site’s current and potential users, as well as that of the editorial team, who upload and interact with site admin across the day. It was important to reflect the diversity of the content and the energy of editorial staff, and support the team’s internal workflow. We also needed to expand the readership beyond its traditionally older readers, who relied on an email newsletter to prompt their website visits.
While there was a wealth of content, the existing site made it hard to navigate and separated out interactions on the forum from actual articles. Together newmatilda.com and the Digital Eskimo project team uncovered important relationships in the content which allowed a taxonomy to emerge which drove the site architecture.
We identified and responded to three main user experience patterns (see diagram), and focused heavily on ensuring the demanding and diverse audience would be presented with opportunities to access the content in multiple ways. Exposing the broad variety of content was also important and the navigation was designed to promote a wide range of material. The Recent Articles menu presents current content in the top level site navigation itself providing ad-hoc users who want to get a sense of the breadth of recent articles on particular topics an effective way to do this.
A flexible tagging system allows newmatilda.com staff to create connections between articles and contributors which is critical for our stated goal of increasing average user time on the site.
We carried out wireframe walkthroughs to test many variations of the tagging system and page UI prior to settling on a small tag cloud under the eye catching image on each article page. This location resulted in the highest amount of eye contact on tags within the prototypes and ultimately click-throughs to related content in the final design. Average time on the web site in March 2010 was a very healthy 7 minutes and 7 seconds.
Importantly, we include the contributor’s name in the tag cloud to further encourage users to engage with specific writers and to raise the profile of this mostly volunteer team on the website itself. This provides value to newmatilda.com contributors and provides a pathway towards individual users subscribing to specific contributors, further customising the newmatilda.com experience for more engaged readers.
Example of User Interface mapping
Desk Research
Our scoping process involves varying degrees and types of research depending on the project and context. We often augment this with a separate research project as needed, however the budget wasn’t available for this project so we chose to focus a significant component of the research on low cost desk research and heuristic (expert) analysis of existing news/content sites.
Our rationale was that millions of dollars have been spent on interfaces solving similar user Interface problems for major organisations such as the International Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal and the BBC. It would therefore result in a very high return on investment to analyse these sites for possible learnings and design ideas.
We reviewed around a dozen sites and borrowed a few key features from relevant designs and also validated some of our recommendations with others. The Recent Articles menu, for instance, is an evolution of the Slate.com interface of the time. Our user interviews also revealed a surprising number of older readers who printed articles out and read them offline so we implemented a basic print style sheet to ensure maximum readability and ease of printing for these users.
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Credits
- Creative Director: Dave Gravina
- Executive Producer: Penny Hagen
- Producer: Grant Young
- Designers: Chris Gaul, Theresa Schiabella
