LA Times

Shaping a personalized news experience

ROLE
Product Design Intern

TIME
June - September 2020

TEAM
Max Lu, Bhaskar Ghosh, Grace Zhou, Ruby Yuan, Selena Jiang

WHAT I DID 
User research, Visual design,
High Fidelity Prototyping

TOOLS USED
Figma

The TLDR

BACKGROUND

The LA Times has content crucial to Californians' daily lives, such as the fire articles and interactive map shown below. Our job was to display that content creatively within the app. The final design followed the existing design closely, allowing us to focus on expanding core features.

DESIGN CHALLENGE

How can we make the LA Times’ app especially helpful for Californians’ daily lives as they navigate the local impact of the pandemic and politics?

OUTCOME

Within the app, our team increased utility through  article banners and improved featured sections, and increased personalization through a "My News" section.


I served as a Project Manager and UX Designer to define product timelines, oversee user testing, and produce low to high fidelity prototypes.

USER RESEARCH

Learning about News Habits

To understand app use broadly, we talked to 23 users about their news app habits.

Overall, we heard that engaging in the news is a ton of work– there were users on opposite ends of the spectrum: those who put intention behind their consumption through daily timers and self-developed algorithms, vs. those who simply saw news if it came across their social media feed.

‍We decided to focus on those who put in less effort into their news experience to reduce friction in their news routine, whose experience is well encapsulated in the following quote:

"I don't like my news experience, but I don't care enough to change it."

What else stood out:

DATA ANALYTICS

Learning from numbers

To understand how readers interact with LA Times specifically, we extracted usage data from Google Analytics, Chartbeat, and the LA Times’ Intranet for analysis. We focused on some key questions such as: Which type of content do users visit frequent and convert on? What topics are popular based on different locations?

The numbers said:

  • The bounce rate in June 2020 was 34%, showing many users stay on the homepage without exploring different tabs.
  • Overall, utility articles constituted 46% of Top 100 articles ranked by sessions per user, meaning people actively come back to high utility content. After COVID hit, the COVID-19 Tracker led to the most conversions.

Narrowing the design scope

Following our preliminary research, we shifted our design focus to the following question:

How might we differentiate the app from the mobile web & build user habits?

In answering this, we decided to focus on increasing utility and personalization within the app. Increasing utility would provide users with helpful information that empowers them to make informed life decisions, while increasing personalization would enable users to curate interesting content that is relevant to them.

Prototypes

The following designs were reached over the course of 6 weeks through 5 rounds of testing with over 50 different users total.

PROTOTYPE 1

Increasing personalization through "My News"

We proposed adding the following modules to a completely separate “My News” section that would be curated by and for users, based on a new feature that would allow users to follow topics and content they were interested in.

Users loved this approach to personalization– many even said they would love for this to replace the current LAT homepage!

NEW FEATURE

My Daily 5

Suggestions for users based on their follows and reading history to filter down the sea of articles they face everyday. Opens in a carousel view for easy access to entire series.

NEW FEATURE

Latest

A chronological feed of update from a user’s follows, with the option to further expand this into an infinite scroll.

NEW FEATURE

Discover

Suggestions that users may be interested in based on their follows and reading history.

NEW FEATURE

Newsletters

A way for users to access their subscriptions when not in their email or on the web. Can be the beginning of further cross-platform syncing.

NEW FEATURE

Following

A chronological feed of updates from a user’s follows, with the option to further expand this into an infinite scroll.

PROTOTYPE 2

Increasing utility through integrated modules

In designing for utility, we first had to define what high utility content was.

Internally, the LA Times defines this content as big builds and evergreen content that remains relevant for weeks or months beyond its initial publishing. This can be tracked by analyzing which articles have the most visits per user over time. While these articles can be seen as popular, this data also points to the fact that users greatly value such information, especially as they relate to health and safety.

Externally, users simply see this content as creative and artistic, according to interviews.

We moved forward with the internal definition at first to explore a newer design territory on the user side.

The LAT's year-end showcase of their best internally-defined "utility" content.

Our first approach consisted of a sticky menu in the homepage where users could access and pin a curated list of high utility content. It allowed them to view information without clicking into an article, and kept relevant content easily accessible.

Users were excited by this idea. However, they were initially confused about what “Pinned” meant and only understood better after exploring the different types of content that could be included. Though the initial placement on the homepage was ideal for access, users thought it was too small of a space for exploring the content.

We also realized that it was confusing for users to see all the utility content under one name, so we broadened our definition of utility to include more content and provide users with more context, now including lifestyle guides such as financial and career advice (beyond evergreen content and big builds), and re-categorized this content to break it down to several action-oriented service journalism items.

Additionally, users confirmed what we learned from analytics– they were unlikely to go out of their way to visit other sections other than those they frequented. The final design proposal below intentionally integrated high utility content into widely used aspects of the feed and took the onus off of users to organize the content themselves.

NEW FEATURE

Featured article banners

This is the first content users see when users open the home feed. Editors will determine what high-utility content is displayed here.

NEW FEATURE

Leave a Review

Visually distinct displays of existing utility articles as part of news feeds that are specific to the section they are nested under. Editors will determine what high-utility content is displayed here.

NEW FEATURE

Search that includes popular content

List of popular articles based on user statistics in the last hour(s) or day, which can be focused on number of clicks or length of reader engagement.

What I learned

In terms of audience and stakeholders, this was the largest project I’ve worked on.

Dealing with practical constraints and blockers, such as the engineering team’s capacity, taught me to envision solutions at different levels that could accommodate for feasibility. It was also a challenge to balance goals from the newsroom on story visibility, the business side on revenue, and our own team on staying user-centered.

On the people side, user research for this project was incredibly fun!

People’s news habits varied greatly– some interviewees even coded up their own RSS feeds! We also met a lot of loyal LA Times readers, and it was heartwarming to see the impact the newspaper had made on their lives for decades.

Don't get too attached to a certain design early on. Back up intuition with research.

There were points during the Utility portion of this project during which we pursued an idea for maybe more time than we should have. In future projects, I aim to take initiative in following my intuition and analyzing user research findings to explore a new path earlier.

Jianna So

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