Brief: The Austin American-Statesman would like to grow its ad revenue by increasing reader engagement.The newspaper has a long and storied history, yet has struggled recently to stay relevant for local Austin-area audiences and advertisers.

Timeline: 2 Weeks

Teammates: Gaia Boyd, Michelle Lee Peters

Process: Survey, Contextual Interview / User Interview, Card Sorting, Affinity Mapping, Persona Development, User Testing

Research: We took a three-pronged approach to our research to develop a picture of where our site sat in the field, what current and potential users interests are, and what their habits might be. We sent out surveys, researched successful papers in similar sized markets, and interviewed local readers. 

Survey: We created a survey to determine user interests and habits, and we found that an overwhelming majority found news via social media, and that more than 2/3s regularly shared news stories. Research has shown Austin to be America’s fastest growing city by a wide margin, so we felt the best strategy for building readership would be to target these new residents through social media.

Contextual Inquiry/User Interviews: We observed and spoke to users viewing the current site, and found a desire for trustworthy and timely information, as well as less salacious reporting. While they found some of the existing site’s aesthetics pleasant, the headlines were too small, the format diverged too often, and stories were difficult to share. After finding a few key areas that people felt strongly about to target, we synthesized these with our broader survey data and indispensable existing user base to inform persona creation. 

Competitive Analysis: To build a picture of where the Statesman stood to gain, I looked at 3 local papers, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Orange County Register, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which are similarly sized metro CSAs (3.5 million) with significantly greater readership (350k+ vs 125k). I found these sites to have cleaner, less stuffed UIs, more clearly organized headlines, and consistent branding that also featured a greater focus on national stories and sports. I also reviewed national news sites VOX, Vice, BBC, and NPR to inform navigation, stylistic changes, and social strategy. 

Affinity Mapping and Personas: We created three personas based on trends in our data which represented Austin’s diversity as well as targeting our growth demographic. We started with affinity diagrams, which led to creating pain points that would be critical to the creation of tasks we hoped our redesign would solve. From the Affinity Diagrams we fleshed out 3 high level personas, composite users based based on a synthesis of the data with some of the specificity of user interviews. 

Task Analysis: Each of our personas represented a different demographic or population we hoped to target. We assigned each persona a task, based on the gathered data, and what people had expressed a desire for during user interviews. Navigating these tasks informed our sketches and eventually the wireframes. 

Sitemap: The sitemap helped us organize the categories and mark out the modular sections that would be of interest to print subscribers and/or registered users who wanted a custom feed. We also wanted to reduce redundancy of having traffic and weather take up multiple top level spaces on the front page, and move poorly supported sections from secondary navigation to the footer. Example: cars & classifieds receive a top level position in secondary navigation, but are actually poorly supported, and only contained 4 classified ads for an entire month.

Sketching: We started with Design Studio as a technique to help get the three teammates to coalesce around what we wanted to see stylistically. This was a lot of fun, and the collaborative solution fostered a great sense of team unity.

Wireframes: I took our sketches and built a clickable prototype in Axure. My goal was to clarify the branding by folding the affiliate websites back into the Statesman proper while still serving its audience. We also highlighted social sharing at all levels of viewership, from headlines to actual article pages.

Prototyping & User Testing: We tested during all phases of the project and attempted to validate our assumptions and decisions. During card sorting we found Austin natives objected to using the term “neighborhoods” to describe cities, which led us to rename that category “Area Cities.” People preferred the cleaner layout and found the larger headlines to be more attention getting. The increased prominence of social media icons proved more intuitive for our testers to share stories and they found it easier to locate those buttons compared to the original site. This directly relates to the research where the vast majority of users discover their news through social media. Improved shareability would drive new users to the site. Likewise, they felt Instagram integration would help build a sense of community through shared events. 

Take Away and Next Step: We believe that our redesign would be useful for driving new users to the Statesman’s website, increase advertising revenue, and reinforce branding. A deeper dive is recommended to target areas of content revision. We would also suggest hiring a social content manager who would be tasked with tracking and developing campaigns around hashtags and social media engagement.