Enhancing reader engagement with new article blocks
A peek into one of the small side-project experiments we worked on at Scroll.
When we launched Video Stories on Scroll, we wanted to create a small indicator to help viewers discover similar content. This was before we had the new home-page design in place. Rather than having Scroll Video Team put a text link leading to the old video feed on every story they publish, we thought it’d be neat if Scroll’s CMS could do this automatically and elegantly.
Since this was supposed to be an experiment and because we anticipated this block might someday become modular enough to highlight other products, we started making some quick sketches and mocks to explore this design. To keep things simple, we zeroed in on including one headline, a small description and a button within this block.
This, along with other entry points like video cards and a link in the primary navigation, led to a fair amount of readers discovering more videos per visit. At this stage, we decided to give Edit Team the ability to create their own custom engagement blocks for any content and collection of stories they wanted to feature.
What we learned
This was a fun little feature to work on. We were happy to see readers discover various collection of stories through these blocks. During launch, I made a mistake of being less clear in sharing usage guidelines with the Edit Team. Additionally, at the time, we did not put any character limit on Headline, Sub-headline and the Button text. This led to a few very odd looking engagement blocks indeed!
What’s next?
We want to take our learnings of working on this feature and explore what we could have done differently and better. Some of these explorations are shown below –
Help us improve
Do you have suggestions on how we could have handled this feature differently? Please feel free to email us with your feedback. We are also looking to expand our team of product designers. If you would like to help us create a better news experience, reach out to us on design@scroll.in
