With an ever-growing landscape of online news coverage, readers today wish to use their limited reading time wisely, while still managing to feel that they are well-read on relevant topics that concern them and the world.
We saw an opportunity to present our readers with collections of articles that would satisfy their desire to know a topic area more thoroughly, and provide them with a sense of accomplishment upon completing them.
It sounded like a good idea, but we wanted to make sure the opportunity was truly worth pursuing. We leveraged research on intrinsic motivation, goal-setting and the effects of positive feedback on competence. Once we cross-referenced this info with existing Times research, we felt confident that the Times customer would appreciate and benefit from exploring the opportunity further.
Next, we identified the most important characteristics our prototype should have. We concluded that timing, tracking progress, positive feedback, and providing clear, manageable next steps would give us our best shot at a successful outcome.
Our Value Hypothesis
By identifying when users want to learn more about a topic, we can help them understand and achieve that goal through progress, feedback, and clear, manageable next steps, which will facilitate their sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.
Throughout the project, we collected assumptions about how our solution would perform. Would users even want to deep dive into a topic of interest? Would they have the capacity to read 3 or 4 articles in a single session? Were the additional stories we showed them engaging?
Two rounds of user testing largely validated our key assumptions. When asked to choose from a list of 70 words that best described their experience, the most common adjectives used were time-saving, comprehensive, inviting and useful. Nearly all of the participants said they would use the feature again.
