News Design Case Study

A Mini Case Study

Part of the Racing Post’s digital transformation piece, Project Janus: Redesigning news and editorial content to be more flexible, more engaging now that the Editorial team were finally able to upgrade their CMS system.

This case study will be quick and dirty, but should give you taste for the work involved.

THE CONTEXT & OBJECTIVES

Short and quick:

The editorial team were finally getting an upgraded, more modern, more flexible content CMS to help them better compete with other news organisations. The new CMS would allow for a larger breadth of content types to be published and more flexibility in how they were presesnted.

This work was being done alongside the larger digital transformation and rebranding work being done for the Racing Post’s Project Janus.

OBJECTIVES

Complete a competitor review of other news and content organisations – how they were presenting and organising content.
Work with Product and Tech on how to refine the UX and visual design to work within the revised News taxonomy
Create highly flexible, yet pragmatically structured modules and templates for presenting content without it all looking like a dog’s dinner!
Design for how to handle: breaking news, festival specific content, photo essays, op-eds, video, audio and photo dominant content and signpost prominently subscription only content.
Also design how data, tipping and betting related modules could work within articles in such as way as to be useful and contextually relevant – the objective was to create more cross-navigation between the news area and racing data pages (e.g. race cards, horse profiles, results pages) to improve engagement metrics and encourage more interaction with Racing Post’s revenue streams.

THE SET UP

My role: Director of Product Design and User Research
Company: Spotlight Sports Group, Racing Post brand
Main Team: B2C product designers, user researchers, B2C product management, news writers and editors & the Editor in Chief

Outside of directing and supporting the designers and researchers on this work (and jumping in with hands on design for certain parts of it!), my main role was to be the bridge between Editorial, Product and the third party tech firm building the new editorial digital CMS the news team would be using.

DESIGNING AND TESTING THE SOLUTIONS

Creating a library of flexible content modules (gallery)

The modules in action on full pages

And new article page layouts, including breaking news

RESULTS

Organisational impact

The editorial team has much more flexibility to present different types of content and keep their audience engaged.

Modules have been steadily rolled out quarter by quarter as dev resource has become available, leading to a steady flow of improvements.

Product impact

The news sections and content look more modern and competitive within the sports news landscape.

Engagement between news pages and racecards / race results has had a sharp increase in the introduction of data modules on article and index pages, leading to upticks in revenue.

Pages viewed in the news areas rose by 2.6 pages per session.

Other Projects

Location

London, UK