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Keywords
News, Publication, Cross-platform, Facebook IA, Responsive Web, Data Analytic
My Role
Lead product designer
Year
2018-2020
South China Morning Post, or SCMP, is a reputable and well- established media in Hong Kong, founded in 1903. They would like to improve Inkstone News, one of their digital products that give readers unique, unvarnished insight into China. Armed with a professional team of editors, one challenge remained: to entice the generation that is used to news update on social media
Inkstone News
UI Design
Up next stories
The up next section shows all available stories of the issue with big cover, titles and read / unread status which is designed to encourage users to stay in the loop and drill down the same issue. Together with the related stories section, it provides multiple ways of reading experience to users.
The Last Wonton
"Last Wonton" was designed as a reward to users who can finish all the stories of the day. Before this story is unlocked, users will see this is masked. This make them desire to know what's the story is about and give them a higher motivation to finish today's issue. After they have finished, we will notify users with an in-site toast message and also an unlock animation as a celebration.
Article cover & Menu
Big headline at the cover page to help reader scan quickly, with the presence of the rail, meter and date stamp, users can identify which issue that they are at as well as the number of unread articles.
Tapping on the menu, users can search topics / edition, sign up for newsletter and be informed when will the next issue be available.
All Projects
When I joined the team, Inkstone’s bounce rate was high – often readers would read the article that looked interesting on social media or email and then leave. My key task was hence to increase the page views per visit. Each day, Inkstone would publish 6 articles, so our ultimate goal was to encourage readers to complete this journey.
The Challenge
What determined the framework of was two major discoveries of our reader’s behaviors. First, data suggests that most of our readers land on each individual story rather than homepage. Secondly, they responded (unsurprisingly) well with features that are similar to social media lay-out. The next question then, is how to integrate these informative content with a more digestible UX design?
The Discovery
The result was a eye-catching, hard-to-miss cover at the beginning of each article, followed by an equally prominent up-next section with a count-down clock at the end. This guide the users with such ease, motivating them to complete the reading journey. What’s more, I have introduced a “Last Wonton” session, which was a piece of incentive content and the users can unlock it once they have completed all 6 stories. The editorial team loved this idea.
These enhancements were launched 3 months since I joined. The pageview increased for 27.8%. Everyone was pretty excited for this result.
Best of both worlds
Social banner for the inkstone official facebook page