Case studybuilding a daily news brief to engage users early in the day
project overview
After the redesign of the Figaro mobile apps in May 2016, I got to work on a new feature on the Figaro app during summer 2016.
One recurring problem our users (and most people) encountered was: staying informed requires time if you are trying to stay in the loop of what's happening in the world on a daily basis. There is so much content available, so many media to choose from. How do you create clarity in a cluttered world?
Brainstorming around this user problem brought us to an idea: creating a morning news brief, that would encapsulate the essential news for our users to keep them informed and, at the same time, enable them to create a selection of articles they would want to read during the day, if they wanted further information about a specific news.
the objectives of this new feature
- Help our users feel better informed every morning, as measured by the number of people who would use the new feature, and keep doing so (signaling they find value to the feature).
- Increase user engagement on the app, as measured by the number of articles read, the time spent on the app per session, and the number of sessions during the day.
- Increase the average number of articles read among the morning brief users, as measured by the number of articles saved for later by the users using this new feature VS the same number for other users.
- Create a new daily reason for our users to open the Figaro app, as measured by the evolution of the number of sessions per day by the users of the feature VS the same number for the other users.
the solution
Stories seemed liked the ideal format for Le Figaro to solve its users' problem. They're very visual and easy to read, you can quickly skip whatever content is not interesting to you, and they're very quick to go through.
We needed to create several templates, so that our journalists could also adapt the stories they'd create to their constraints. For instance, though we recommended using mostly photos and videos as background for the stories to be more immersive, they sometimes had low quality photos or none at all.
The goal of these different templates was also to avoid a sense of monotony, if all the stories were going to look the same.
The card before the last one was made so our users, after having read all the news, would be able to save articles for later. The use case would be: "I have read an interesting story and would like to know more about it, but I don't have the time now".
conclusion
The morning brief was a hit in terms of views at the launch of the feature and did help with user engagement. One thing we improved after we observed disappointing numbers with the "save for later" use: we moved the ability to save an article directly in each story instead of leaving a summary at the end.
As of 2023, the stories still exist and are now used to enrich articles and even have a dedicated section on the app and the website.