You’re reading the My News Biz newsletter, which I will be sending you every other Thursday. My goal is to help you and other digital media entrepreneurs to find a viable business model that works for you. If you were forwarded this email, you can sign up here. 4 design trends that will dictate whether people adopt your digital product or serviceMake your users' experience as easy as possible; if you frustrate them, they will leave
You’re reading the My News Biz newsletter, which we send every other Thursday. Our goal is to help digital media entrepreneurs find viable business models. This week our guest collaborator is David LaFontaine. He is a Lead UX designer and problem-solver who bridges the divide between the creative and business sides of organizations. He has consulted with media around the world on digital design and development, multimedia content creation, and web analytics, among many other specialties.
What is it? UX Design creates a user’s experience (UX) with a product. It’s one of the key reasons that some users are only “one-and-done” with a product while others build unshakeable loyalty and even evangelize to recruit new users into the fold. Why Should I Care? News organizations are not just in competition with other publishers; they’re fighting for attention from all the other digital content outlets — all of which spend a great deal of time and effort on crafting their user experience. How Can I Use It? Improving UX does not have to mean a ground-up redesign; the best of the leading social media and entertainment giants are in a constant, ever-evolving phase of continuous improvement. Even small, incremental improvements in UX can pay off in increased loyalty (and revenues!). Part 1 of 2: Table Stakes for Digital Publishers
If you’re not paying attention to the changes in the way that digital products and content are being consumed, you risk being completely — perhaps fatally — out of step with what your audience is used to and is already demanding. My professional evolution from newspaper reporter, editor, and investigative journalist to UX Designer has called upon a lot of the core skills that journalism school drummed into my head. But one of the hard lessons I’ve had to learn along the way has been that the internet fundamentally upends the power dynamic between content creators and consumers. The People Formerly Known As The Audience have infinite choice at their fingertips. Every book, song, or movie, ever made. Anywhere in the world. Instantly. That power of choice means that our users can bounce, lightning fast, from an experience that doesn’t suit their wants, needs, and desires — to one that does. Design is about more than just making things look pretty. UX Design concerns itself with making the experience of using a product or service as easy, pleasant, and rewarding as possible. Designers throw around buzzwords like “elegant” or “graceful” or “delightful” to describe things that just feel good, that strike the invisible tuning forks inside us, to make us want more. It’s redundant and somewhat old-fashioned to note that digital media is fast-evolving. But there are some design principles that have come to the fore in 2024 that affect your audience’s expectations. Part 1 of this guest-post centers around the “Table Stakes” for publishers. These are design considerations that you absolutely must be thinking about, if not already engaging with. Each of these design trends has a different meaning and impact in the world of enterprise-level software, so I have customized them to make them more relevant for the news industry.
(Image generated using Adobe Firefly) While it is now common for newsrooms to have big monitors bolted to the walls or ceilings that display up-to-the-minute traffic numbers, to truly find the valuable insights lurking inside the data, publishers are going to need to dive deeper inside the analytics. This data needs to intersect with design to help refine content strategy. If you are expending significant resources to create stories, podcasts, videos, infographics, etc., that nobody really pays attention to … then the question is not just “Why?” but also “How do you plan to stay in business?” Basic traffic data and why it matters:
Going Beyond The BasicsEvery publisher needs to at least engage with the basic page traffic data explained above to get an idea of what their audience is interested in. The following data points are ones that are important to take the next step:
Externally focused Big DataThe stories news organizations cover are increasingly complex, and require journalists to be able to acquire, normalize, and analyze large and complex datasets. Stories about infrastructure spending, climate change, how demographic shifts affect political races, and whether the availability of library books leads inevitably to social chaos are just a few of the themes where data analysis is an essential tool.
(GIF from the movie “I, Robot” that featured this climactic battle scene of robots versus humans. Courtesy of Giphy and 20th Century Fox) Many journalists have the attitude that we are in a life-and-death war against Artificial Intelligence, as it is coming to take all our jobs. The fears of a godlike AI arising and turning into Skynet from The Terminator are still, luckily, overblown. In the meantime, using artificial intelligence and machine learning to take over repetitive drudge-work from journalists is starting to catch on, even in small newsrooms, down at the local level. Two good steps: using AI to transcribe the audio of city council or school board meetings or to help personnel-strapped newsrooms to cover high school sports games that they otherwise would have missed.
(Image generated using Adobe Firefly) AI can also be used to do basic proofreading on articles or to generate illustrations to accompany news articles (as was done using Adobe Firefly above, and elsewhere in this article). From a pure design perspective, companies like Cover Rocket (full disclosure: I have worked as a consultant for the owner), offer galleries of AI-generated magazine covers and potential headlines for editors and publishers to choose from or to use to spark creativity. (An AI headline writing experiment.) Please note that I am in no way advocating for removing humans from all content-generating functions and just using unmonitored robots to crank out low-effort stories, art, podcasts, or (eventually) videos. That’s what the spammers do. Instead, the “creatives” who hope to not just survive, but flourish, are learning how, when, and where to use AI to enhance what they do. It is by no means a clean, predictable process. But then again, neither was learning how to use social media platforms. And by now we all understand at least a little about how to use Twitter, yes? AI is not going to replace humans. Even the most sophisticated Large Language Models (LLMs) — like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Twitter’s Grok, or any of this ever-growing list — lack the context, and the humanity, to be able to independently create a story that emotionally resonates with our audiences. Instead, AI with human supervision can be a force-multiplier. It can empower journalists to collect and analyze vast amounts of information quickly and then surface those choices in a content channel (text, audio, video, art) that best reaches the people most interested in that information.
Personalizing user experiences is a high-risk/high-reward design trend. We’ve all seen the stories about invasive cyber-surveillance that have generated so much outrage (and billion-dollar court judgments) over the last decade. Under the guise of providing “a more personalized advertising experience,” platforms like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, etc., have collected every scrap of data available about our likes, dislikes, and secret obsessions that they can. And then they’ve sold it off to the highest bidder. Don’t do that. Instead, carefully craft the kind of experiences that create affinity by making your audience feel like you pay attention to what they like — and don’t — and that you are trying to be helpful, not manipulative. HELPFUL: A news site covering health care that surfaces a pop-up or other notification on the screen to an individual user that says, “We’ve noticed you’ve been browsing for articles about ways to preserve joint health. We have a collection of articles by physical therapists that you might find interesting, as well as these reviews that rate the best medications or braces. Our other readers have contributed their opinions as well in these user forums that you might find interesting. Click here to check it out, or click here to turn off our recommendations.” UX Designers have found that one of the keys is to give your audience control over their options. Again, people don’t like to feel manipulated. CREEPY: The same health-care news site, instead of surfacing a polite pop-up message that lays out the how, what, and why, instead changes the entire content mix of the front page of the site to be all about expensive ankle or knee braces, with affiliate links that pay money to the site for sending traffic their way.
In the wake of the George Floyd protests and the “Me Too” movement, the past few years have seen a heightened awareness of diversity and inclusion in newsrooms and content coverage areas … as well as a fierce backlash. I won’t be addressing the various issues around diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) in personnel decisions, but instead on how to widen inclusivity beyond just the faces in your newsrooms. One of the recurring themes designers are grappling with in e-commerce and enterprise-level goods and services is the growing appetite on the part of our users to collaborate with the brands they love, to co-create things that fit their needs, wants and quirky senses of humor. City governments in the U.K. and the U.S. have long sought ways to get their constituents engaged, finding success with holding online contests to vote to name things. Chicago playfully named its new snowplows “CTRL+SALT+DELETE” and “Bad, Bad, Leroy Plow” and dubbed an escaped alligator who lurked in a local pond as “Chance the Snapper,” a play on local music legend Chance The Rapper.
Taco Bell was recently named one of the “Most Innovative Companies in the World” by Fast Company magazine for doing things like including suggestions from fans of their food to create entirely new menu items — even when the process spiraled out of control in ways that make traditional Brand Managers reach for antacids:
The payoff for news organizations would not just manifest in an increased level of reader attention, interest, and affinity, but also in increasing the diversity of perspectives and the coverage areas. Years ago, when social media was first starting to get traction, it became fashionable for pundits and newsroom managers to say of user-generated content that “The newsroom just got a lot bigger.” An early positive example happened at the Bakersfield Californian’s experimental local social media platform, “Bakotopia.” Matt Muñoz, a local music promoter, walked into the offices one day, hoping to build a partnership to reach fans, and wound up being an editor for the next decade. Unfortunately, the initial optimism around including our audiences into our journalism foundered as journalists were subjected to stalking, trolling, and other forms of online abuse, and learned to fear interactions with readers/listeners/viewers. Into that void stepped “Influencers,” with their Internet-native instincts, thick skins, and knack for energizing their followers to evangelize for their content. The ultimate effect was seen recently at the International Symposium for Online Journalism, where the increasingly blurred lines between “Influencers” and journalists was on full display. Journalists are leaving (or being laid off from) traditional media outlets and starting their own social media influencer channels at the same time that influencers are starting to do more journalism. Among the crucial practices that influencers do to make their followers feel included, are:
Next time: Table Stakes Part 2 will share three more user-experience (UX) design trends that newspaper publishers need to know about. You're currently a free subscriber to My News Biz. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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