Project Overview
newmatilda.com serves up some of Australia’s most progressive analytical writing, satire and illustrations, and represents the kind of independent media that is vital to a healthy democracy. The publication came to Digital Eskimo wishing to redesign their 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 extend the reach and increase the time spent on site and page views dramatically.
Challenges
The new website needed to extend its reach and increase incidental traffic to the site, ensuring an engaging user experience once there. newmatilda.com’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 above 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.
Average time on the web site this year to date is a healthy 2 minutes, 47 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
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 group session analysis of existing news/content sites.
Building off the strong UI of major organisations such as the International Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal and the BBC, we also 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.
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. 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.
Comment participation is through the roof and we are looking at ways to manage the vibrant and heated discussions taking place on the article pages.
Quite recently we added a prominent link to newmatilda.com’s Twitter feed, which in a few months has built an audience of 1,500 subscribers. This is now driving traffic to the website across the day, reducing the reliance on the newsletter and providing further distribution for the content.
View Website
Credits
- Creative Director: Dave Gravina
- Executive Producer: Penny Hagen
- Producer: Grant Young
- Designers: Chris Gaul, Theresa Schiabella
