NYC Product Festival and Design at G9 Media

This past month, Group Nine Media sent me to NYC’s Product Festival, an event where designers and product enthusiasts meet and share their learnings from working in tech.

Major companies were there with a lot to say. Spotify spoke about about growth through data feedback loops, Tesla spoke about about building teams to build cars of the future, Google spoke about designing for VR and AR, Airbnb spoke about about how they build marketplaces for travel, and Dropbox spoke about building better managers.

Personally, I geek out over product design presentations and love hearing fellow designers and product managers talk about their craft. I’ve been a user experience designer for Group Nine Media for about 2 years, and in the past year alone we have redesigned four websites (Thrillist, The Dodo, Seeker, NowThis) and designed new tools for an exponentially growing audience. It’s been a wild few years for us, and each of our projects have come with abundant product learnings. It’s refreshing to go to these events to hear what other designers are saying.

In this post, I’d like to mention a few takeaways from the conference that mirror the lessons we’re learning as we build products for media. Here are those notes and comparisons, and an introduction to what the design team is working on here at Group Nine Media:

Design for an Evolving Audience

Blake Barnes, a Product Designer at Instagram, explained AB testing at Instagram and how it ensures that the product evolves in complimentary ways to evolving users. Users are always changing, and they don’t always know how they are changing. It’s up to research and data to help designers ensure that the product grows with their users, and not behind them. Some takeaways from his presentation were:

• Understand the different type of people using your product
• Bucket your tests into finding a goal. Instagram uses tests to answer one of these four things: Understand (the environment), Choose (a better layout), Identify Weakpoints, Quantify impact

As a design team, we at Group Nine Media are constantly adapting to our changing audiences by investing time in platform research, understanding the design and tech constraints for each new platform, and conducting user experience interviews. We rely heavily on Google Analytics whenever we make design changes, we look at how different styled buttons have different clickthrough rates, and we identify if whether video length affects how long a user stays on the page. Additionally, we are evolving our design process and teamwork with our developers and we are making smaller teams to push out designs faster. Since our redesigns of NowThis, Seeker, the Dodo, and Thrillist, we are in a continuous feedback loop with users to see how they interact with the products we make.

After working in media for a few years, I can say that young millennial readers are some of the fastest adopting audiences out there. As the landscape for discovering digital content changes as fast as news comes out, there are always new platforms and sites to discover content. New platforms and means of content consumption emerge every day. Media is moving from text to video, to AR/ VR, and beyond all with the powerful devices we carry in our pockets.

Build Internal Tools for Growth

Companies grow fast and therefore need growing tools to support their growing teams. Jason D. Schwartz, Product Director at Spotify, spoke about the internal tools they’re building to help their teams continue to create a great music experience. Some of the tools he spoke about were Spotify’s internal email automation, push automation, analytics, and growth toolstacks. Big takeaways from his talk were:

• Build tools to optimize your team’s work so that they work well and consistently well
• Grow internal tools to increase speed so you can iterate faster
• Internal tools should allow better testing frameworks and identify user behaviors faster

Internal tools is another important topic here at G9 — investing in internal tools so that we can create better products for users. To a list a few, we are currently iterating on our content creation and curation tools for editors, our media distribution tools for all brands, and our asset management tools for managers. We are continuously working on improving our CMS so that our writers and video producers can manage their work and easily share it with the world (but that post is a long one to write about…more later ;) )

Expand into VR, AR

VR and AR are generating some serious buzz in every industry. Brittany Mennuti, Product Manager for VR at Google, shared insights into how Google was expanding more into VR and AR. One of the big projects they’re working on is Blocks — software to create 3d models in virtual reality. Some quick takeaways she gave us about the project with Blocks were:

• Everyone has a “mini computer” in their pocket, design for these different devices and different hardware
• Rely heavily on your product’s community — they’re the most involved users and therefore provide best feedback
• Be as personal as possible when answering user feedback, you will grow incredible and loyal customers

Media is also whole-heartedly interested in sharing content through new AR and VR experiences. As the Tech and Product team continue to grow at G9, we are investing in our emerging platforms team to discover how tech such as VR and AR can benefit our various brands. You can find more about their work at emergingplatforms.groupninemedia.com. We are building prototypes to test our hypotheses, and testing our projects with users to gain insight into how we can make these experiences better. (We recently built a 360 Video interactive experience for our famous office dog, Dalloway ) Additionally, the design team has been reading up on AR and VR techniques and are studying best ways to use VR and AR to avoid user fatigue and create cool user experiences.

Final Notes

Overall, the conference was a great experience for me and I enjoyed hearing takeaways from industry leaders in the tech space. I hope this blog post was helpful to anyone that was interested in the festival and couldn’t go, or anyone interested in learning about the product design team at Group Nine. I highly suggest that anyone interested in product or interested in design go to the next Product Festival — I think the takeaways could apply to any part of a company, whether it be design, engineering, sales, marketing, etc! Additionally, I know that many of the people on the tech and product team here at G9 are always interested in speaking to other industry designers to hear what they’re up to in the product design space.

For me personally, I would love to read more about telling great stories through design, designing for VR and AR, designing better tools, and how to become a better team player in design. Leave a comment if you’d like to recommend an article for me to read!

Special thanks to Chao Li and Brandon Smith for editing this article!

We are hiring! You can see all our open positions on our jobs page. To read more about our work and what working at Group Nine Media’s Tech and Product team is like, see our other blog posts here.