Live blogs
Journalism Dev OKR
Designer / Project Lead
Guardian Editorial
2021 - 2022
The Journalism Dev team was spun up to collaborate with editorial and provide end-to-end design and development.
Live Blogs emerged as a top editorial priority after reader insights showed they rely on them to navigate complex news.
Given the success of 'The Politics live blog' with 2500 editions and 1 billion page views, live blogs were chosen as the focus for the pilot project.
Space for collaboration
To help jump-start the project and create a shared understanding, I introduced flexible weekly workshops. These jam sessions were an open and pressure-free space with an emphasis on conceptual and strategic elements, not on operational details.
Our approach to discovery and research involved a combination of moderated interviews, unmoderated usability tests, comprehensive competitor analysis, and detailed data and insight reports.
I worked with the data and insight team to identify additional metrics and develop new dashboards for ongoing analysis.
Orientation
“… difficult to understand where I was in the stream of posts if I was late to it”
Overwhelming amount of content
“… you are just hit with this huge block of information at the top of the site”
Scanability
“… I think I was trying to find a way to quickly see the order of events, and understand if this was new information.”
To encourage wider participation in the ideation process, I encouraged team members and stakeholders to express their ideas in various formats, from sketches and long-form texts to screenshots and reference links.
Rather than focusing on polished designs, we concentrated on articulating the fundamental concept and its underlying rationale in the form of ‘scrapbooks’. The team could then easily discuss, critique and build on ideas.
Developing designs and knowing when lorem ipsum is not enough
Sketching - enabled designers to capture ideas, pair up or go off-piste.
Wireframing - helped us thoroughly explore states with engineers and discover edge cases.
Prototyping - offered rapid validation opportunities with users.
Proof of concepts - provided a true-to-life representation of the product. We used code to display dynamic content which helped us with internal stakeholder discussions.
Signals and noise
The news cycle presented a challenge when attempting to A/B test on liveblogs. News events generate unpredictable spikes in traffic, making it too difficult to find a clear enough signal to make informed product decisions.
We decided to monitor core health metrics and engagement with other elements on the page. We also ran unmoderated usability, task completion, time on task and desirability tests in parallel.
Pinning posts
Orientation
We heard in interviews that readers could be easily confused when first arriving on the page and often felt a disconnect between the headlines and the first post in a fast-moving story.
Having a pinned post at the top of the page would provide readers with easy access to the most important recent developments.
Offering smart filters
Deeper filtering
Readers expressed concern about information overload due to the volume of content. We investigated filtering options to showcase key events or updates focused on specific topics.
I collaborated with data scientists and engineers to experiment with Named Entity Recognition (NER), a technique in natural language processing. By automatically tagging entities at the post level, we laid the groundwork for smart filtering features. We could then provide a way for readers to conveniently follow specific topics of interest, like their local area, in an election results live blog.
Timeline of key events and summaries
Scanability
User studies revealed that as a story develops, identifying key plot points in dense narratives requires significant effort.
A glance at the timeline with its key events and summaries gives visitors a quick grasp of the story's flow. They can instantly pinpoint major plot points and seamlessly jump between them.