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Objectives & Goals 

The product is a complex b2b platform offering stakeholders and media insights targeted at mainly users in the external affairs function. As the current media feed is cluttered with information (that users might find redundant), I was tasked to enhance the UX/UI and design a solution to be implemented on the media feed that will help add value to the Engagement Strategist (product's core persona),

To do that, the following information needs to be first understood: 

  1. What information on the media feed is important for user's to do their jobs?

  2. What are the frictions experienced by users while using the media feed?

  3. Which pain point of the Engagement Strategist are we trying to solve?

  4. What is the Engagement Strategist's user journey and touch point with the media feed?

Deliverables & Responsibilities

A recommended media feed and an improved look and feel of the media page was conceptualised and implemented after two ideation workshops with the team and a validation session with the users.

I was responsible for the following:

  1. Conducting competitive research

  2. Defining the problem statement and HMW statements of the Engagement Strategist 

  3. Analysing the Engagement Strategist's user journey map

  4. Planning and facilitating internal ideation sketching workshops

  5. Planning and conducting a validation test with users​

  6. Designing the improved UX/UI of the media feed

Competitive Research

Research was conducted on 3 other media platforms offering similar features to find out what our competitors are doing and help guide the ideation of solutions for our product's media feed.

INNOREADER

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Inoreader is a content reading platform, which allows users to discover and consume relevant information on any topic through curated feeds. 

​

GOOGLE NEWS

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Google News is a site that aggregates headlines from news sources worldwide, groups similar stories together and displays them according to each user's interests.

MELTWATER

Meltwater is a holistic platform solution for PR and marketing professionals to monitor, track, and analyse media and social media intelligence for brands.

Strengths of each platform:

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Innoreader

  1. Shows the number of unread articles in each feed

  2. Suggest topics based on search

  3. Sort by most popular and relevant media

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Google News

  1. Curated feed based on interest areas

  2. Able to follow topics, locations and media sources

  3. Full coverage which provide more context about the topic and a sensing of the bigger picture 

Meltwater

  1. Comprehensive search function

  2. Sentiment of each media item with the ability to edit

  3. Reach of publisher and social echo of each media item

Emphatising With Users

The next step was to put ourselves in the shoes of our users and to better understand the problems they face in their role. To do that, we looked at the Engagement Strategist's problem statement and user journey map.

We also decided to look at the problem statement of the other 2 personas - the Innovative Spearhead and Information Conduit as media consumption is a integral part of their workflows as well. For more information on the personas, click here. It was clear that all 3 personas require a way to quickly obtain relevant information from the media. Therefore, the solution that is implemented for the engagement strategist might be useful to a certain extent to the other 2 personas as well.

PROBLEM STATEMENT OF INFORMATION CONDUIT

The Information Conduit is a detailed and responsive risk analyst who needs an efficient and comprehensive way to stay on top of all issues that are relevant to his company so that he can quickly retrieve and disperse relevant information to a variety of departments.

PROBLEM STATEMENT OF INNOVATIVE SPEARHEAD

The innovative spearhead is a forward thinking and risk averse international relations director who needs to identify issues before they become a problem to her organisation because she needs to formulate well thought out strategies ahead of time to minimise risk to the business.

PROBLEM STATEMENT OF ENGAGEMENT STRATEGIST

The engagement strategist is a anxious and proactive government relations manager who needs relevant, adequate and timely insights to have clarity over what is happening in order to react appropriately and quickly to ensure his organization maintains a good standing.

HMW statements were also formed to help kickstart the solutioning process. As seen in the table below, most of the HMW statements apply not only the Engagement strategist, but also the other 2 personas.

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Analysing the User's Journey

Since it was decided to design a solution to improve the UX/UI of the media feed, we focused specifically on the part of the Engagement's user journey where there is interaction with the media feature to identity opportunities and insights.

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Solutioning (part 1)

The first ideation workshop was done with the product team alone. The user journey, problem statement, HWM statements and competitor research were used to guide the conceptualisation of new ideas during the workshop. 

There were several interesting solutions that came out from the workshop such as advanced filters, recommended media, related media, etc. The solutions that best solved the engagement's strategist problem was then shortlisted (based on voting).

After the session, the shortlisted solution - recommend media, was evaluated again by going through the user journey map. The idea were also discussed at a very high level with the data science team on its feasibility and scope.

Solutioning (part 2)

Another ideation sketching workshop (this time involving the development team) was conducted for ideas on revamping the UI/UX of the media feed as it currently has too much information and is too cluttered.

A high level user flow was put together (taking into consideration the user journey that the engagement strategist might take with the new solution -recommended media) for this workshop to aid the participants in brainstorming for ideas. The user problem statement, HMW statements and user journey was also explained during the workshop.

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There was also a voting session to vote for the UI/UX design ideas that will best guide users to pick out and consum relevant and important media items. The feasibility and effort was also discussed during the session with the development team.

User Validation Test

The shortlisted solutions were then utilise when designing the low-fi prototypes for the validation test which consist of a series of 3 exercises with 7 participants from 5 organisations.

For the first part of the validation test, participants were asked to think out loud while going through the current media page and deciding which article to consume. This helps us understand what information users consider as crucial to help them decide which media articles are worth consuming. Information that users find useful will be classified as "primary info" and shown to users whereas redundant information will be classified as "secondary" information and hidden to reduce clutter on the media page.

KEY FINDINGS: PART 1

  • All users look at the title to gauge the topic of the media item.

  • 6 users looked at the summary to provide more context about the media item especially when the topic of the media item can't be inferred from the title itself.

  • 4 users determine if a media item is worth consuming through the stakeholders tagged or the mention of the stakeholder in the article title/summary.

  • 3 users looked at the media source and mentioned they are more likely to read a media item if it came from a trusted source.

  • 3 users look at the sentiment to quickly determine whether the media item indicates a risk or opportunity (together with other components such as summary and stakeholders) before deciding to read it.

What media components do users look out for when deciding which media item to consume?
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For the second part of the validation test, participants were asked to go through a set of articles recommended by the media recommender POC the data science team created and indicate if the articles are relevant so that they can use the feedback to optimise the accuracy of the media recommender engine's predictions.

KEY FINDINGS: PART 2

  • A majority of the paticipants look out for very specific topics contained within specific geographies. They usually focus on key topics that are important to them. For example, changes in the political scene in municipalities in Africa, business opportunities for street lightning in USA only or a specific environmental initiative in California but not anything else.

  • 2 users also look at specific events such as protests that mentioned their organisation on a global level or news relating to the conversations that takes place between participants in the African Energy Week

  • 3 users feel that the recommended media feature will help them consume articles faster.

  • 3 users have concerns that they might miss out on important media Items 

What constitutes a relevant media item?
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How can recommended media add value?
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What are the concerns regarding recommended articles?
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For the third part of the validation test, participants were asked to go through 5 simple prototypes while speaking what is on their mind in order to understand which page layout and format provides users with the best experience when consuming media.

KEY FINDINGS: PART 3

  • All participants felt that layout 2 provides them with the best experience as it is clear and easy to navigate and makes good use of the space.

  • However, some of them wish that there were certain components present such as the summary and stakeholders mentioned to provide an overall better experience and help them decide if a media item is worth consuming before clicking on it.

Participant's Feedback on Layout 2
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Layout 1
Layout 2
Layout 3
Layout 4
Layout 5

Final Design & Implementation

The insights from the validation test was shared with the development, product and data science team. Discussions took place regarding the final design, feasibility and optimisation of the recommender engine before the final implementation.

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Challenges Faced 

The challenges faced during this project fall within 3 main categories:

  1. Feasibility of implementation

  2. Internal use cases

  3. Insufficient data for recommendations

FEASIBILITY OF IMPLEMTATION

  • Because there are many dependencies on the components on the media page and how it links to the different features on the platform, it was difficult to make major changes to the components.

  • Although it was decided that the recommended feed would be the default view on the media page, it was not possible because there are redirections from the different features to the media home page and users will be shown the recommended media instead of the latest articles.

  • The recommended media tab was supposed to be placed on a more visible area on the page (as per the prototype). However, as there are different behaviour between the 2 types of media feed, "latest" (filters can be applied)  & "recommended" (no filters), it was decided to place the tabs to switch between recommended and latest media on the filter column to make it less confusing.

INTERNAL USE CASES

  • The internal users such as the professional services team and the data team are also users of the platform and how they use the platform is vastly different from the external users.

  • The internal team are focused on mainly capturing insights and maintaining the data quality of the platform. Therefore, with the revised design where secondary information is hidden by default, internal users will need to perform additional clicks in order to access the information they need. 

  • Therefore, there was various sessions with the internal team to align on their use cases and convey them to the development teams on the various permissions of the different components.

LACK OF DATA FOR ROBUST RECOMMENDATIONS

  • Initially, the idea was to recommend media items based an individual's users media consumption activity and its content. However, there are several users in an organization who do not consume media and as a result will not see any recommended media.

  • It was then decided to recommend media based on the media consumption patterns of the team so that there will not be a blank recommended feed.

  • However, we realised that not all organization that use the platform consumes media regularly. Also, not every user is interested in consuming the same topics in the media. If there is a heavy media user in the organisation, it might skew the recommended media towards the interest of that heavy user.

Next Steps

Success metrics such as clicks on the recommended media tab, highlight/bookmark/share news and recommended media conversion funnel were defined and set up on Mixpanel to track the "success" of the feature after it was implemented.

The mixpanel reports will be used to identify areas of improvements for the next iteration of the feature.

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