6 ways to improve your content-driven product
Interested in learning about how to build content-driven products that don’t suck? After you read this post, join @mignano and me at our next Product Secrets meetup on September 24th, 2014. Chris Stang and Andrew Steinthal, co-founders of The Infatuation, will be sharing their secrets about how they grew a hobby into a beloved content-driven site that continues to gain massive traction every day.
Content products are tough. For every new twitter client, photo app, or news site that pops up, there’s always a doubtful throng of consumers waiting in the wings to ask why they should use this one when they have a perfectly good option already.
So let’s assume you’ve got your great content figured out already — engaging, high quality content is a given for you. Hey, good job! Now here’s how you can set yourself apart from everyone else who’s gotten that far.
1. Get responsive.
Mobile web usage isn’t going anywhere (and apps have long ago overtaken desktop browser consumption). If your website sucks on mobile, or if your app is a sad webview of your standard website (we can tell!), your consumers aren’t going to stick around for long. There are plenty of places to find content on the internet, and a good mobile experience is a great way to set yourself apart.
Text, buttons, and photos should be huge. Slideshows should work and should be controllable with normal mobile gestures. We get that ads are necessary, but don’t let them get in the way of your content or that’s the only page view you’ll get from that reader. For a great example, check out the Verge (who, as usual, do just about everything right):
2. Simplify.
Quit designing for the sake of design. Innovation means nothing if you’re actually making the intended use case of your product worse. There is a very special kind of zen that comes from accepting that your job as a product creator is to get the hell out of the way. If your users don’t even notice your UI, that’s the best compliment you can receive.
We, like everyone else in the world, love Medium for its simplicity and (to borrow a timely Apple reference) for deferring to content whenever possible. Look at this thing you’re reading right now. All you can see is text. Nice, right?
Not only does Medium get out of the way (there’s nothing there the author doesn’t want to include), but their focus on clean, impactful design makes every Medium article seem more powerful. There is a reason why “serious” writers (and their readers) have swarmed to Medium from more full featured platforms.
3. Don’t confine yourself to one medium.
Content doesn’t have to just be a singular experience. More and more, content-driven products and lifestyle brands are using social media and interactive campaigns to build more of a connection with their audience.
One perfect example, my personal favorite recipe website: Inspiralized.
First, the website gives me a ton of different ways to interact with the recipes. I can subscribe to get recipes in my inbox (something which, it’s worth noting, I would only consider for already terrific content that I really can’t wait to hear more about). And, if I go into the menu, I can access all kinds of Community features: there’s a forum where people are discussing these recipes, there are recipe challenges, there are different groups I can join, etc.
And there’s also a link to the Inspiralized instagram, where I can follow along in a context I already use every day. That’s really important. I may not remember to visit the website every day (and I may get sick of email updates and unsubscribe), but Instagram is a great, unobtrusive way to remind me of all the great stuff happening over on that website that I care about. If I see an awesome photo of food I want to eat here, I’ll definitely go look up the recipe so I can make it. It’s a nice way to promote engagement without getting all up in my face.
4. Build with customization in mind.
If your product is text-heavy, allowing users to customize it and create their ideal reading experience will give you a big leg up against your competition. You can let readers change the font, switch between day and night themes, change the font size, and lots more.
Instapaper and Oyster both handle this nicely:
Taking it one step further, Oyster even lets users decide how they’d like to progress as they read each page — they can either tap or swipe up — maintaining the feeling that the reader is controlling their experience, as opposed to it being arbitrarily determined by some strangers who built the app.
5. Make sharing seamless.
I’m going to go ahead and make up a statistic here: 90% of why people care about browsing content is so they can share it with their friends and followers. It’s not just brands who need to find content to post about on social media. Just saying.
So easy, fast, convenient sharing is a big deal — regardless of which category of content you’re serving up. And Reeder has always understood this. Long before Apple made extensibility a household word, Reeder added a ton of sharing options so that people weren’t limited by iOS’s built-in sharing options. (And we’re talking the original Reeder, not even the iOS 7 update for Reeder 2!) Check it out:
Save to Instapaper? No problem. Email to a friend? Do you want to mail a link or the full article? Cool, still one tap. Want to copy the link to your clipboard so you can paste it into a tweet with no fuss? Of course you do!
This kind of forward thinking is what differentiates good apps from great ones. Don’t be scared to be the first one doing something different, assuming people actually will understand how to use it. Which brings us to…
6. Oh yeah, and innovate.
Remember that thing I said about how you shouldn’t design for the sake of designing? Well, sometimes there are exceptions. Like when you are solving a real problem and improving the experience people are used to with your competition. Funny enough, both of our favorite examples of this come from twitter clients: Tweetie (no longer available) and Tweetbot.
Loren Brichter’s Tweetie, as everyone probably knows, was the first app — ever! — to include pull to refresh. It’s so heavily baked into all mobile devices now that it seems crazy no one thought of it before, but they didn’t. And it felt weird for like a second when Tweetie first came out, but then it felt… great. It made us all start pulling to refresh our email and then sending angry complaints to Apple when that didn’t work.
Tweetbot was the first twitter client I ever used that added thoughtful, time-saving gestures and options. You can tap on a tweet to view options inline (previously unheard of), you can double tap to favorite a tweet, and you can swipe a tweet to the left to be taken to a detail view where you can easily read the conversations happening around it. To me, I got so used to these options that they ended up being requirements for me, and I can’t really enjoy any other twitter app because they all feel so clunky.
So anyway: innovate. Not because you want your app to be the prettiest one; not because you want to win an Apple Design Award; but because you want to make the best possible experience for people who are trying to enjoy your terrific content.
Hopefully this was a helpful overview and gave you some ideas on how to improve your content-driven products. Feel free to add a note here if you have any other great examples or hit up Mike and me if you’d like to chat! We also regularly post tips, examples of great products, and helpful new tools — check out @productsecrets on twitter to follow along!
