AP UX Week '07: CNN.com Relaunch Case Study
[Live blogged from Adaptive Path UX Week '07. CNN.com Relaunch Case Study with Lori Adams and Dermot Waters from CNN]
Purpose: relaunch CNN.com to give the user a more compelling and useful destination for news on the web, utilizing any new technology.
Started with an 11-step process document.
Step one was discovery. This involved sitting down with every type of person in the organization, user surveys, user behavior data analysis, competitive analysis, persona development, and an assessment of the technology landscape.
They learned what ideas existed in the organization and what people wanted from CNN. Adaptive Path helped with competitive analysis and persona development. They did a user behavior study involving 24 users to understand how people use news online and how this online behavior fits in to their news consumption generally.
This kind of research was new to CNN but the organization embraced the personas. The 6 user types helped to change the conversation.
For a presentation to CNN big-wigs they handed out t-shirts that read "We are not our target audience." This idea actually came from management.
After personas, the next step was to create a directional statement. They took everything from the discovery phase and processed it into a coherent direction.
- Define a new standard for the online news experience
- Present a unified, comprehensive view of the scope of CNN's brand offering
- Focus on content that aligns with user behavior
- Connect users with content personally relevant to them
- Maximize the value of CNN's human perspective, assets, and expertise
- Improve productivity, agility, and flexibility of CNN.com
In addition to these six objectives there was a list of what they wanted to accomplish followed by another list of why they wanted to accomplish these things.
The took this directional statement and moved into the next phase. They broke into eight working groups who were assigned clear mandates including tasks and deliverables. This process took input from 65+ staff members from across the company. The outcomes were then fed back across all groups in CNN and Turner. They then distilled these outcomes into the core feature set.
From this, six cornerstone concepts emerged:
- Integrated storytelling
- Connection
- Participation
- Personalization
- Linking
To communicate these underlying concepts internally, Adaptive Path designed a series of posters to go up around the office. They also had a clear elevator pitch that was repeated and repeated.
The story page is called a "mosaic." Before a visual existed, this term enabled them to talk about what they were aiming at. The "minor topic page" is another example of this. These landing pages are completely automated based on taxonomy and ontology. They can then take these ontologies and layer editorial content on top of this. A "special report" is easy to build when you take advantage of this automation. They added commenting as a first step toward user participation. They are starting to do more with this. After the bridge collapse they invited people to submit stories and videos. This material was then used throughout the network on TV, etc. They decided to do passive personalization.
Linking was a totally new concept. They consciously decided that they wanted to be a good web citizen. They realized that this would generate traffic and tell the story more effectively.
This site is designed from the idea that users do not always enter from the home-page.
After they had all of these concepts, they started with a simple conceptual prototype. This was the first time they did this kind of prototype testing.
After testing they partnered with a visual design firm but when the design phase was complete they decided to throw out the process document. They picked a date a set a schedule working back from that date. They refined this schedule to include ALL aspects of the project including stakeholder reviews, time to make changes after reviews, etc.
The team was sequestered. They called this the "Relaunch Protection Program."
As they built, they used a wiki-style tool for requirements tracking. This was a HUGE success though they eventually moved to a ticketing system.
The beta was a new idea for CNN. The biggest hurdle was double publishing because it was a huge change in workflow, CMS, etc. The hardest day of the whole project was when the beta launched. There were three stages of feedback: Baseline, beta, post-launch.
Q: How do you evaluate success?
A: Research is working hard on understanding how this has changed. The feedback via opinionlab comment cards was very helpful. There was a dramatic shift from design to editorial and that's when the new that the design had been accepted by the audience.
Q: How does your team work?
A: The team evolved throughout the process. A big change was from the system driving the human processes to the human processes defining the system.
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