Shifting Lenses: A first look what a mobile-centric live blog could be
As part of our inauguration experimentation, we have a new feature we’d like you to try. We’ve taken the basic elements of a live blog and reworked them to create what we hope will be the first step towards a better experience of live coverage for a mobile readership.
Some background: Last year, at the start of the lab, we started thinking about how live coverage could better suit a mobile-first era, and noticed how little had changed since live blogs became a popular format used by a large number of news organizations, in a pre-smartphone era. We looked at lot of live blogs covering a variety of news events and noticed they shared a number of common features, ones that make them ill-suited to modern mobile reading habits.
First, there’s currently really only one way to move through most live blogs — from the most recent update to the oldest. This organizational principle matters when you consider all the different times readers may be entering a live blog. There are very few clues as to what has happened prior to the first update they see (usually the most recent) and what the latest post means in the context of others. That most recent post might build on a narrative thread the blog has been following for some time, or introduce a new topic, or correct an earlier assumption.The reader is left to decipher for themselves how it fits into the whole..
Second, and most relevant to this experiment, a live blog doesn’t consider that a user might find some information in the live blog more interesting or more useful than other pieces of information. For example, some users may prefer maps or other visual elements to text describing a location. These limitations are compounded on mobile where reading a live blog can feel like an exercise in endless scrolling.
On the conviction that there has to be a better way to make reading a live blog a more enjoyable experience on mobile, we worked last year with the agency Code & Theory to design and test a variety of experimental features that would avoid some of these common usability pitfalls.
User testing on the prototypes we developed with Code & Theory validated some our ideas about how users might like to experience live coverage differently on mobile if given the opportunity. Participants in user testing, all of whom habitually read news on mobile, told us they liked having additional views that presented live coverage in separate chunks of information. They also liked the idea of having better navigation within a live blog and that, while they liked the overall feel and timing of a live blog, they liked the idea of having views that could provide additional visual context and location easily.
With these insights in mind, we took one of the features we (and our testers) were most interested in, and have built it to test out for the first time as a proof of concept on inauguration day.
The feature is called Shifting Lenses, and it’s designed around the idea that multiple views on a story help users to better follow live coverage.
We’ve adapted the original prototype for the inauguration, and introduced “lenses” called On the Podium and Off the Podium, which will follow, respectively, everything happening on stage and in the official program, and everything happening off the podium and around those events. Both narrative lines will be critical to making sense of the day’s events, and we hope presenting them this way will keep some of the nuanced moments of the day from getting lost.
For this first test, all of the content for the lenses will come from the Guardian live blog. We are running a number of other live features on inauguration day, so this feature will begin in the afternoon.
From this first test, we’re looking to validate (or disprove) some of our initial hypotheses, and get baseline data on how users interact with this feature when it is applied to a real event. Specifically we’ll be looking to see if and how often users swipe between the views, and what they tell us about how this new feature affected the way they consumed the news.
We hope you’ll try it out, along with the other experiments we’ll be running that day and let us know what you think.
To do that: Download the Guardian Mobile Innovation Lab iOS app and tap sign up to subscribe to notifications. You’ll receive a notification when we begin the experiment leading you to Shifting Lenses. Or, click here for a web view.
After the experiment concludes we will send a survey asking for feedback. Let us know what you think then, but if you have questions in the meantime, send us an email at innovationlab@theguardian.com
The Guardian Mobile Innovation Lab operates with the generous support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
