Design Sprint for a new article page
In September 2018, a core team from three different departments came together to do a dive deep on the article-page experience. We set a vision, explored what success would look like and examined how our competitors address the problem. Our research lead us to interviewing experts from inside and outside the company (including a data scientist from MIT who has dedicated his research to understanding the online article page). We sketched, debated, prototyped and interviewed customers to see if we could improve the experience of reading our online content while supporting our business goals of delivering great journalism, driving digital subscriptions and generating online advertising revenue.
In a Design Sprint we work together to create a clearly defined long term goal that we hope this solution will achieve. The stickies and notes in the image above shows the thinking that went into the creation of our long-term goal, left.
After some intense brainstorming, the team combined their ideas into paper prototypes. Here we see some of the Sprint Team’s work taped to the wall. We used dots to vote in order to see what ideas were resonating.
An important part of a Design Sprint is validating the ideas with real customers. We invited Star readers to come in and tell us what they thought of the new ideas and designs. This led to some further iterations and us realizing that after the design details, interactions were equally important so we layered that on too.
This short but very intensive time kick-started the Article Page Redesign Project. We continue to iterate on the article page by adding features, validating with our readers and measuring success both qualitatively and quantitatively.
