How USA TODAY NETWORK is serving the ever-changing digital needs of users
At USA TODAY NETWORK, our Native Apps team took the challenge to experiment and find a new way to serve the evolving needs of our users. Charged by senior leadership to think and build differently, we were given the room to take risks in the Native App space. The primary objective: Learn what solves the problems that users face today and find new solutions to meet their needs.
We started by attempting to solve a new job: After being offline for awhile, whether working or sleeping, we want to be quickly updated on the most relevant and important things we missed without having to scan through what can oftentimes be an overwhelming amount of headlines.
In order to test and quickly learn how to better serve users, we built a new app on Firebase — a platform developed by Google that’s designed with integrated analytics and notifications along with remote configurations that includes multi-variant testing. Firebase has the tools we needed to quickly explore new ideas and experiment, which empowered us to spend more time learning from user feedback instead of spending time writing all that code from scratch.
When the prototype was in a sufficient state to take a spin, we looked internally to gather quick feedback. We asked our teams to spend time with the app and share their thoughts on the experience. We set clear KPIs focused on user engagement (such as return frequency and visit depth) to gauge success.
While our internal prototype was far from perfect, it provided valuable insights which led to refinements supporting a public beta release.
- We quickly learned that large, edge-to-edge images were engaging, but with some limitations. For example, we stopped featuring tweets — their limited-size images didn’t deliver engaging visual impact. We quickly validated this through an A/B test of two app experiences — one with tweets and one without — which confirmed an increase in engagement when tweets were removed.
- We wanted to limit the app to only deliver a small, yet relevant, number of articles at an easily scheduled time each morning or evening. Users appreciated the scheduling option but also wanted the ability to view more content and add topics as a bonus round. This lead us to add a “Load More” option that allows users to continue reading beyond their initial bundle.
- We wanted to add gamification to encourage users to stay up-to-date and reward them for using the news app regularly. Users loved the idea of earning badges for reading and engagement habits but wanted a clearer understanding of what they were earning. Firebase’s remote configurations allowed us to add, adjust or remove certain accomplishment badges to refine what was offered with the app. This helped us offer clearer badge descriptions to guide the user through the goals set by the app.
- To help users quickly find the content they care about we automatically curated the most important topics relevant to them. To rank content by importance, we wanted to expand beyond the editors’ decision-making process — so while the app factored in how and when content was pinned to a “front page”, it also included active and passive personalization strategies that could change independently of app releases. We added a list of server-side configurations, enabling us to create variants to target specific sub-segments/audiences of users. For example, users that show a high affinity for Cincinnati Bengals content will be grouped into an audience that will receive a higher percentage of Bengals content on average.
- We built a Kotlin library — shared between iOS & Android — which consumes available content and personalized configuration, preferences, history, and affinities to keep the two platforms in sync. That library consumes the master list of content, a personalized version of the server-side configuration, and the user’s preferences, history, and affinities to construct a tailored set of content twice each day.
All of this user feedback provided us the insights and clarity we needed to introduce a beta release to existing users in Cincinnati. The app, called Cincy Sports Catchup, allows users to select the teams and topics they want, and personalize the content “bundle” they receive within the app through a simple thumbs up or down. Download it today and see where we head next.
We continue to explore how to best solve users’ needs, experimenting with additional A/B tests to identify data driven solutions that help us add user value.
