NewsNow: User Research Initiative

After 25 years, NewsNow had millions of users, but they knew they had been leaning on assumptions about who these people actually were. Since we were planning a major product overhaul, it was about time we really got to know the people who use our product.

My role: I built the company's first user research programme from scratch - designing and deploying a site-wide survey, analysing 6000+ responses, conducting moderated interviews across three continents, and establishing research operations as an ongoing capability.

The scale: Survey responses across the UK, US, and Nigeria. Interviews with users ranging from corporate executives to teenagers on 3G connections.

Through the course of this project, I helped NewsNow to make product decisions based on real data from their global user base and to use this data to inform qualitative design decisions. I also established ongoing research as core capability, directly informing the redesign strategy and all subsequent product development.

Twenty-five years of product decisions had been based on A/B test results, voluntary feedback, and educated guesses from the engineering team. This was a valuable starting point. However, we were planning the largest redesign in the company's history, so it was time to really understand the people we served. There was strong appetite within the team - including senior management, editorial, and development - to better understand our users. I put together a plan and advocated for human-centred design principles as part of a more efficient and effective product lifecycle.

I had three clear objectives:

1. Identify core readership demographics - who actually uses NewsNow, their motivations, and contexts
2. Test our new design concepts with real users before launch to ensure it was rock-solid
3. Build research capabilities that would outlast this single project and inform future development

The challenge: doing this for a global platform with no existing research infrastructure, no user database, and no established relationship with our community.

I implemented this initiative through my own adaptation of Design Thinking methodology. The reason for not following the Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test process to the letter was that the product wasn't yet in a state conducive to iterative product design. We were mid-redesign, developing a new design system to pave the way for iterative workflow, but we needed to ensure the new design would be well-received and that major potential pain points could be worked out prior to release.

Data Gathering: The Survey

I launched a site-wide demographic survey targeting random users via Hotjar, asking broad questions about interests, usage habits, age, gender, location, and general news reading habits. The goal: identify both the general demographic makeup of our existing userbase and NewsNow's place within their news diet.

I was also able to gather additional metadata for each submission - which pages users submitted from, device information, and responses from users who didn't complete the full survey (useful for checking selection/response bias).

Within a few weeks, we accumulated over 6000 surveys.

I also used Hotjar to generate heatmaps across different topic categories to understand how users on different topics might behave differently from one another, and gathered quantitative data from Google Analytics to understand device/browser/OS distribution, usage habits, and behaviour.

Analysis: Three Platforms, Not One

I spent significant time processing the 6000 responses in Google Sheets, slicing the data various ways and looking for patterns that might help uncover segments within the userbase. I weighted responses by geography and device category, using Google Analytics data from the survey period as a source of truth for calculating weights.

We already knew from analytics that we had users in the UK, US, and Nigeria. What we didn't understand was how differently they used the site and why.

Upon applying weights and segmenting by country, I discovered vastly different distributions of age, topical interests, and device usage between the three groups. The demographics in each segment appeared narrow - we were appealing to specific age ranges and interest categories in each country that were distinct from one another.

To validate this, I referenced publicly available data regarding online news readership from Ofcom, Pew Research, Statista, and SimilarWeb. By checking our data against these broader demographic insights, I confirmed the boundaries of our users' segmentation and identified prominent demographics in the wider population (both UK and US) that were underrepresented in the NewsNow userbase.

UK users: Our UK users skewed towards an older demographic, and whilst they were predominantly mobile users, they had higher desktop usage than other segments. They were obsessed with football, using NewsNow to scan dense lists of headlines covering everything from FA Cup finals to granular local team updates. Politics and business were important to them, but supplementary to football.

US users: Our US users were of all different ages. They tended towards mobile usage and had broader interests. These were general news consumers interested in politics, business, entertainment, and American sports coverage. They wanted balanced news consumption across multiple topics.

Nigerian users: Our Nigerian users were younger and exclusively mobile, accessing the site on feature phones via Opera Mini with extreme data saving enabled. They were obsessed with British football - they found better Premier League coverage through our aggregation than local sites - and also followed Nigerian politics and entertainment news closely. They needed lightweight experiences that worked on limited data plans for following both their own national news and football.

UK users wanted to obsessively analyse every football development through compact, dense layouts. Nigerian users needed lightweight experiences for Opera Mini, so they could get their national news, as well as football. US users wanted balanced consumption across multiple topics.

Based on my analysis of survey results, analytics data, and third-party data, I crafted personas representative of our core users. In addition, based on demographics I'd found to be under-represented, I created additional personas for our target demographics - with the goal of better serving these groups and subsequently growing and diversifying the NewsNow userbase.

I created a full write-up of the findings, including methodology, data and charts, sources, and a summary of results, which I presented to the wider team.

The Interviews

Through our earlier demographic survey and through dedicated research participant recruitment services like UserInterviews.com, I recruited participants representing all key segments for 30-minute moderated, recorded sessions.

I led all the interviews, with a junior designer I was managing observing and keeping notes. The methodology was semi-structured interviews - offering a relaxed atmosphere and opportunity to build rapport whilst ensuring all talking points were covered.

The process for each interview:

First, I'd understand more about the participant - their interests, hobbies, news-reading habits, and day-to-day life to understand how our product fit into their routines. Then I'd show them the product and ask for first impressions and gut feelings about the overall look, feel, and utility.

Beyond that, participants were free to explore and were asked to vocalise their thoughts and actions. I'd answer questions, note potential pain points, and occasionally offer guidance - either to ensure we covered all talking points or to help if they got stuck.

At the end, I'd sit down with the junior designer for a general recap, collating notes and tagging points of interest in the recording.

Instead of static mockups, users tested our working staging site built in Vue.js with real data. While it was far from full feature-parity, it was leagues ahead of a Figma prototype and caught complexity that static prototypes would have missed.

Once all interviews were complete, I led the creation of a findings summary and a highlights reel containing the most interesting clips from our recordings, grouped into categories. This gave colleagues and management a quick glimpse into participant responses without requiring them to watch hours of footage.

The research fundamentally changed how NewsNow made product decisions. Key discoveries:

• Our "global" platform was actually three distinct regional products with different needs
• Users weren't anti-change - they were anti-losing-functionality
• Mobile usage patterns varied dramatically by geography and available infrastructure
• Power users had sophisticated workflows we'd never documented - and many of these "edge cases" actually represented entire segments of communities

The insights directly informed our redesign strategy. We established ongoing research as core capability, moving from assumptions to evidence-based design.

For the first time, we were able to understand and empathise with the NewsNow userbase in a direct and immediate way. We learnt which parts of our new product were working well (in some cases even better than expected), and which parts needed improvement. We gained better understanding of how our product fit into the wider industry, how users interpreted the brand against competitors, and how we might better serve a more diverse range of people in the future.

Some of our initial expectations were challenged. For example, we had originally intended to modulate the density layout mode to tailor it to the topic, but it actually turned out that it was really the user segments that had consensus in terms of what they would prefer, even when segments of users had overlapping topics.

Looking back: The overall results were enlightening, challenging, and extremely positive. I successfully introduced complementary, strength-based research and testing processes that laid the foundation for human-centred design principles. This initiative gave our users a seat at the table for the first time in 25 years, and established a more effective product lifecycle going forward.