News

Role:
User Experience Designer

1. Project Goals

• User Goals:
• Allow users to easily discover news content, categorised into short, live, and in-depth clips.
• Provide a seamless experience with clear metadata for each news item.
• Business Goals:
• Integrate news content alongside existing categories (shows, movies, sports) to expand the platform’s offering and attract a broader audience.
• Increase user engagement by presenting news content in a structured, easy-to-navigate format.

2. Research and Define

• User Research: Conducted surveys and user interviews to identify preferences for accessing news clips, including the need for content categorisation and title clarity.
• Competitive Analysis: Analysed how leading platforms present news content, focusing on categorisation and ease of access for users.
• Insights: Users tend to scan the thumbnail images more than the metadata titles when browsing content. This suggests that visual appeal and thumbnail clarity are crucial for effective content discovery. Users still appreciate categorisation but rely heavily on visual cues to identify content of interest.

3. Ideate and Prioritise Solutions

• Concept Development: Developed design concepts using sports content components, such as categorised content tiles with titles and categorisation for short, live, and in-depth clips.
• Prioritisation: Focused on delivering a simple and intuitive experience for browsing news clips, ensuring that the thumbnail images were engaging and the categorisation was clear.

4. Prototyping

• Prototype Creation: Created high-fidelity prototypes featuring categorised news clips with clear thumbnails and titles, ensuring the experience was consistent with how sports content was displayed, with tiles for each news category.

5. User Testing and Feedback

• Testing Sessions: Conducted usability tests on the web app and CTV platforms to observe user interactions with news tiles and categorisation. Feedback focused on the clarity of titles, thumbnail visuals, and ease of navigating between short, live, and in-depth clips.
• Key Findings: Users primarily scanned thumbnails to identify content of interest, confirming the importance of high-quality, eye-catching thumbnails. Users also appreciated the clear categorisation of content.

6. Refinement and Iteration

• Refinements: Optimised thumbnail images to be more visually engaging and ensure they stand out. Adjusted layout for clear differentiation between short, live, and in-depth clips while maintaining consistent categorisation design.
• Usability Enhancements: Enhanced thumbnails with embedded short text titles, providing users with immediate context while browsing. This embedded title text further supported users’ tendency to scan images first, making it easier to identify and select content without needing to read additional metadata.

7. Implementation

• Development Collaboration: Worked closely with developers to implement categorised news tiles, focusing on ensuring the thumbnails were optimised for high visibility and smooth navigation across both the web, mobile, and CTV platforms.
• Launch Strategy: Rolled out the news category incrementally, monitoring user interactions and engagement to gather feedback for future iterations as the content feed scales.