Philly.com is undergoing a redesign, and soon, users will get a look at the process for themselves. Through beta.philly.com, they’ll find previews and a place to submit feedback.
“The idea to do it as an open process really harkens to our roots in the newsroom,” said Ben Turk Tolub, director of product at Philly.com. “We’re always telling politicians and everyone else they should be open and tell everyone what they’re doing, and so we’re taking a note out of our own playbook.”
Last Thursday, Eric Ulken, executive director of digital strategy, wrote about the process and some goals for it on beta.philly.
Think about the last time your favorite news site redesigned: Did it catch you by surprise? Did it feel different or take you longer to find things? Did it take a splash page to explain all the new features? Now consider products like Facebook or Gmail: Can you even remember the last time they were redesigned?
What I’m talking about is the difference between redesigns in the traditional sense — months- (or years-) long efforts with a big reveal (and a big leap of faith) at the end — and continuous, small changes that through testing and observation over time yield better results with less disruption to the user.
“Fundamentally to me it’s about the distance that we have historically had from our audience in digital and breaking down that distance a little bit,” Ulken said, “and trying to put ourselves in the shoes of the people that we purport to serve.”
Screen shot from beta.philly.com in May.
Past redesigns that he’s been a part of lacked an understanding of users’ needs, he said.
“So one way to do that deliberately is to invite users to play a role,” he said.
Philly.com is working through the process with Philly-based design collaborative Superfriendly and Happy Cog, a design and consulting firm.
“Many digital design processes see organizations and their partners working away in secret for months and months, then launching something and crossing their fingers that it’s the right thing,” said Joe Rinaldi, Happy Cog’s president. “Iterating over design reflects a more natural way for organizations to allow their product to evolve into what their communities want and need, and involving readers’ feedback and usage patterns into that iteration cycle is a great way to inform that process.”
Parts of the project are happening in the open, Rinaldi said, with those involved asking readers for their insights after certain benchmarks. For instance, they’ll solicit feedback from users as part of the open beta of the article page, Ulken said, and they’ll do one-on-one user research on the homepage and section fronts before going live.
“We have also talked to key advertisers and agencies, who are an important constituency in the redesign effort, about their needs and wishes.”
And Beta.philly will be the home of the live results.
“We’ll have the opportunity to evaluate our updates in an apples-to-apples live comparison, test-driving our thinking and improving and iterating in ways this type of project affords us.”
The team’s first sprint was toward a redesigned article page, which will be mobile responsive. That’s something that has been neglected over time in favor of the homepage, Turk Tolub said.
“And really, the article is where we should be spending all of our time.”
In the next few weeks, beta.philly will share a look at article pages so far.
“It’s not gonna set the world on fire, but it is what we think is the first pass at an article page redesign that we feel is worth showing and getting some feedback and some data on,” Ulken said.
By the end of the year, they’ll have the mobile relaunch ready. Early next year, the full redesign will go live. They’ll focus on feedback and analytics, including page load time, bounce rate and engagement rate for mobile.
There’s nothing about the process that should feel like a big reveal.
“We don’t want to sneak up on people,” Ulken said. “We want to be able to telegraph that we’re working on something new for a good long while.”
Screen shot, beta.philly.com in October.
They hope this approach will help avoid pitfalls that redesigns often encounter, which are often based on incorrect assumptions about the user.
“I think we’ve seen a lot of digital-first or digital-only organizations be quite successful in responding to user needs in a way that a lot of newspaper companies just aren’t really well equipped to do,” Ulken said. “I guess the strange irony here is that for all the professing to be very user-centric or customer-centric, newspaper companies don’t really have that intimacy with the customer that a lot of digital startups do.”
Rinaldi agreed.
“From a reception perspective, news sites — especially local ones — simultaneously stand on the shoulders of their communities while also being responsible for serving them. We’re always stunned when news sites launch redesigns without the involvement of their readers and inevitably wait for the backlash,” he said.
And if they do it right, Ulken tells his colleagues, “this is the last redesign we’ll ever do because we’ll be continually redesigning after that.”
