My Guardian

Using personalisation to answer readers’ ultimate needs

Reader focused; data informed and experimentation led

Challenge

This project was born out of a fundamental business challenge: how to convince users to register, stay signed in, and subscribe when the core product is completely free, and the signed in/ signed out experience is identical?

Data showed that signed in users were more likely to subscribe in the long run… However, up until this point, our strategy largely relied on prompts encouraging users to register, sign in, or contribute.

But prompts alone could only go so far: we needed to give users a reason to create an account: something that felt useful, personal, and worth the effort.

Through user research we identified key and deeper motivations that went beyond reading news, and that required a much more nurturing relationship with our readers.

This is where My Guardian came in: by introducing personalisation we aimed to create a meaningful relationship, catering to user’s needs, while also serving key business goals:

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Increase engagement
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Improve ad targeting
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Create a clearer pathway toward conversion.

My role

Triggered this initiative, delivering its first version: from initial hypothesis to Beta release.

Championed the need for deeper connection with users, based on research insights

Supported the creation and onboarding of the newly formed Personalisation team

Acted as the glue between this and other projects, aligning different initiatives

Facilitated workshops and led the design and prototyping of multiple hypotheses

Conducted both moderated and unmoderated usability testing to validate early concepts

Designed smoke tests to gather feedback from Beta users

Partnered with a visual designer to refine the user interface

Outcome

New area on the Guardian news app with massive potential to scale

New matured team dedicated to bring real value to readers

Increased knowledge on our users needs and behaviours

More of a plan, less of a process

This project was all hands on deck with many activities happening at the same time:

Quickly put together two prototypes for moderated and unmoderated usability tests to assess hypotheses on what content and or features would be relevant for users;

Together with the team ran a live smoke test to gather qualitative data from our Beta users;

At the same time I started to look into different paradigms / approaches to how the user would be able to set up its own Guardian page; looking into navigation and onboarding to this new area;

Ran a series of workshops with the team to ideate based on the information gathered.

Knowing our readers deepest needs

During my time at the Guardian, while working on multiple projects, I had come across different types of previously done research which I would often consult and leverage to either guide my work or to set the stage for new research.

This was the case with some research efforts that had led to a list of Jobs to be Done which I often used to guide my designs.

This list highlighted the need to go beyond providing news and start catering for deeper and more emotionally driven user needs.

Some of our user’s Jobs to be done:

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Make me respectable
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Give me things to talk about
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Help me form an opinion
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Help me anticipate things that affect me

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Help me connect with people
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Entertain me
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Testing content hypotheses

What content do users want to see?

We ran a moderated and unmoderated test with users to understand how they felt about this concept of My Guardian as well as how they felt about the content.

In this example, with the "My weekly collection", the goal was to both provide users with useful information to cater for their need to learn and form opinions and to surface other Guardian formats and services that would otherwise go unnoticed, such as documentaries; podcasts; long reads and masterclasses.

Live smoke test for Beta users

Simultaneously we ran a live test to gather data from a bigger pool of users. The goal was to receive unbiased feedback as well as assess our content hypotheses.

Reassembling with the team

Workshops with the Personalisation team to digest users feedback; ideate and set next steps.

With the information from the research and the workshop with the team I started iterating not only on the main page, but also putting this feature together, with navigation; onboarding; and merging it with other features such as Save for later.