The Challenge
The purpose of the homepage is to communicate the authority and the values of the mastheads, while showcasing the important, interesting or enduring journalism our audiences seek, so that we can engage, satisfy and upsell our most loyal customers (homepage landers) and drive commercial revenue. Design a new homepage experience that meets both business and editorial goals whilst delivering on audience needs.
Kick-off workshop
We ran a series of workshops with multiple stakeholders across the business to gather requirements to help inform form our brief for research.
Editorial input - Playback outcomes from recent conversations with others in editorial.
Commercial input - Current homepage performance and commercial requirements.
Product & Strategy - Current audience problems from ongoing research and outlining product vision, strategy and goals.
Research objectives
Unpack reader expectations for homepage across devices.
Explore how new homepage concepts signal authority, values, recency and relevance.
Understand how new content groupings and proposed topic order is perceived.
Understand the role and value of proposed new features and service elements.
Project Principles
We created a set of project principles to help guide us along the way.
Play to our strengths
Leverage our unique perspective, depth of coverage and brand authority
Be Flexible
Support the varying pace of the news cycle and the ebbs and flows of the newsroom
Drive habit
Create reasons for news seekers to come back time and again, and ignite their loyalty.
Paper prototyping for rapid iteration and flexibility
Priority Feature Synthesis
After user research we created 3 buckets based on levels of confidence.
High - We are confident that this feature will deliver value to users - Start refining.
Medium - We are unsure if the feature will deliver value but it has potential -Explore further.
Least - We don’t think the feature delivers the value we expected - Rethink.
15 sections to be re-designed
From our discovery phases of work, we identified 15 sections of the homepage that would be put forward for research testing: The Header, Top stories, In other news, Local, Business, Politics, World, Opinion, Explore, From our partners, Editor’s picks, Domains, Life & Culture, Sport, Special coverage
Design system - Flexible components
We created a series of re-usable components as part of a wider library to give our newsroom the ultimate flexibility to tell the news how they see fit.
A flexible Opinion component that caters for varying numbers of stories.
A richer Sport news experience
Giving both the reader and newsroom greater breadth of coverage with a larger range of design components.
A mini-nav for our quick access to our top sports, scoreboard integration, a headlines at a glance content unit, a video stories plus new features such as my teams - a personalised news feed dedicated to your favourite team/s across NRL, AFL and Rugby Union.
A new Life & Culture section
We new from our research and data that this area of the homepage was a key destination for our readers. I designed this to signal a subtle change of pace from the harder hitting, faster pace news further up the page. The insight was that once people had read the top stories, a large percentage were interested in a different news. Content to relax, inspire and unwind to at their pace. This also tapped into the varying cadence of news departments across Life & Culture.
Results
We delivered double digit growth for 9 key ares of the homepage.