Anything but fake news — how Insider won Election Night
By: Rachel Furst
Tags: Storytelling, Product Development, Election 2020, News, Product Management

My team and I went back to the drawing board to rethink the problem. How could we get users to turn the page? To answer that, we narrowed down our opportunities to recirculation, a method of highlighting stories of interest to a user, and navigation, a way to help users discover content of interest. We then vetted them through the lenses of feasibility, usability, viability, and value.

Recirculation was quite feasible; the coronavirus module was already built and beyond this we had pre-existing methods for recirculation. Since recirculation was a longstanding feature of our site, we also knew that aside from a few minor improvements it was usable. However, it was only when we evaluated recirculation from the perspective of viability and value that we realized we were off the mark.

The business wanted a way to seamlessly showcase to users every story we’d written for the election — over 250 stories. Moreover, the value we could provide to readers was in showing them content related to their individual interests. In other words, showing the right set of content that would engage and resonate most with each of our millions of readers.

Imagine wanting to showcase a tailored combination of 250+ stories, for millions of users.

We realized our recirculation module would not be able to effectively highlight more than 5 stories, and though editors could curate the modules to reflect what they thought users would be interested in, we couldn’t be certain we’d capture user attention.

Thus, the recirculation module we had built for coronavirus coverage, though viable and valuable for the story we were telling about the pandemic, was not viable and valuable for what we were trying to accomplish for the election.

So, we turned to evaluating navigation.

Navigation too was technically feasible. Though we hadn’t built something like it before, through a brainstorming session we had an idea of how we could make it work. We were also confident that we could run our designs through a user test to ensure the feature was usable. Most importantly, we could build this feature in a way that both captured the scope and depth of our election content, while also making it seamless for our users to discover stories that would be of interest to their individual needs.

Stakeholder Meeting Round Two

To not completely reinvent the wheel, our UXD team used the coronavirus module as the basis for our new navigation design. The original module was adapted to include a drop down menu that allowed users to select individual states. Changing the state would update the information in the module to display story links to all relevant races for the state they had selected. This design enabled us to showcase all of the content Edit had written, and allowed users to actively filter for what they were interested in.

We figured out a way to individualize the set of content shown to each user.

Insider’s navigation module — Election 2020 Storytelling

During the next meeting with stakeholders, I introduced the new concept for the module.

“The module will appear on each election story, and its default display shows all related races for the state a user’s reading about. But, say a user wants to read up on races for a different state. They can use the dropdown to choose their state of interest, which triggers the module to update with a whole new set of stories related to the state they selected. What do you think?”

The stakeholders were silent, and since I was sharing my screen, I couldn’t see the expressions of my editorial colleagues.

“Sorry, forgot I was muted,” one stakeholder remarked. “That is awesome.”

I grinned excitedly. We had a viable product.

Build, Measure, Learn

Once we had buy in from stakeholders, we embarked on the build, measure, learn cycle.

In product management, the build, measure, learn cycle refers to a process in which teams design and develop an MVP of a feature, test it either through user testing or A/B testing, and then take the learnings from the test to determine whether to pivot away from the idea or to persevere, continuing to improve it.

So, the engineering team entered the development phase, building out the functionality of the module and an endpoint to power the feature.

Meanwhile, my team and I still had questions around where the feature would best live on our site and how we could encourage readers to interact with the module. To get answers, we ran a user test, exploring questions like:

Were users likely to keep reading an article if race results were revealed at the top of a page?

Were users likely to search for race results for multiple states?

What were users’ initial reaction to our feature?

Was the module easy to use?

Running the test helped us determine optimal placement for the feature and inspired us to include a call-to-action in our stories’ signature summary to “explore more race results below.” We also learned how we could better temper user expectations by incorporating arrows into the module buttons to clarify that users would be taken to a new page.

Most importantly, the user test validated that our feature was valuable and so, we persevered.

Results

We launched our module a few days ahead of the election to ensure that it was working as expected and to iron out any bugs that cropped up after releasing the feature live on the site.

In the ensuing days our team entered an energetic state we lovingly call “organized cowboyism.” We transformed into a single-minded unit, squashing bugs, communicating changes, and intensely coordinating releases. We were tired, anxious, excited. We were a force.

Election Night proved to be a seamless and successful event for our team and newsroom. We didn’t encounter any major hiccups or bugs; the night was (thankfully!) uneventful, other than for the election itself, of course.

A few days later, when we analyzed the data, we were shocked. Our efforts had paid off.

Users who interacted with our navigation module read 345% more stories than a user who did not

Users who engaged with our navigation tool read 5.8 stories compared to the 1.3 stories read by users who didn’t engage with the module. The module increased the number of stories read per user by 345%. What’s more, this feature alone drove an over 5% average increase in pageviews per user visit compared to our last election news cycle. Our success proved how valuable our work was.

Product Principles Work

What started as a barely-proposed-instantly-shot-down-idea ultimately evolved into complete product success on Election night. The results speak for themselves. Following basic product principles can indeed lead to great achievement.

And perhaps even sweeter than what the data showed was the validation of our efforts by our editorial partners, who recapped the election season applauding our efforts, noting the work we did “highlight[ed] the best of what we can offer as a news organization.”

How’s that for build, measure, learn?