Guardian Mobile Innovation Lab: Lab lightning talks

Spurring a New Wave of Mobile Innovation in News March 26, 2018 #gmilday
Lab ‘lightning’ talks
Members of the lab on their projects and methods

The talks
Alastair Coote, developer, Being a developer in the lab
Madeline Welsh, associate editor and Jana Kasperkevic, reporter, The jobs report
Lynette Chen, senior analytics consultant, MaassMedia, Analyzing innovation
Dylan Greif, product designer, Multimedia with podcasts
Mazin Sidahmed, reporter and Sam Morris, designer, Approaching Smarticles

Being a developer in a lab
What to do, what to look for
By Alastair Coote

Why is it different? The usual product dev cycle:
Idea
Specs
Designer Developer
Finished product

What happens
in a lab?
“I counted how many
times certain words
were said in a team
meeting today.
Don't worry - it was
the best meeting of
the week!”

Developer needs to answer fundamental
questions
● Can we do this?
● What platforms will it be able to run on?
● Why can’t we do X?
● What can we do that isn’t immediately obvious?

Example: Primary notifications
● PLUS: we could create ‘self-updating’
notifications (technically these are
separate notifications with the same tag).
● PLUS: we could create mini-visualisations
that lived in the notification icon.
● ISSUE: Had to run a signup form on our
own domain, gdnmobilelab.com, instead of
the Guardian’s own site.
● ISSUE: Experiment would only work on
Android devices, through the Chrome
browser

Example: UK Election Notifications
● Entire project was conceived because of a
change in the Notifications API in Chrome,
something I only knew about through the
Chromium bug tracker
● Let us attach a large image to a
notification
● We did a writeup on how we put it all
together.

Things to check
● The Chromium blog
● Chrome Status
○ You can subscribe to web notifications for updates!
● The Webkit blog
● iOS Beta Release Notes
○ Particularly when there is a big new version coming up. There will be in June for WWDC!
● Google I/O Conference
○ Although less so - Android is less centralised, so updates come more often

In conclusion: what a lab needs in a developer
● Be vocal.
● Be proactive.
● Take the time to investigate.
● Talk to people.

And what you can offer a developer
● Involve them from the start
● Give them time to research
● Encourage them to share with other
developers

The Jobs Report
A story about collaboration
By Madeline Welsh and Jana Kasperkevic

Hello! We are
Jana Kasperkevic
@kasperka
Madeline Welsh
@madelinebwelsh

We worked together on an early lab experiment
The jobs report notification series ran from April to October 2016, and was a first
try at expanding the format of notifications to be a content series type that users
could expect on their lockscreens the morning of the US jobs report.

The project was great for a lot of reasons, but our
favorite reason is the collaboration that happened

It started with an email
The mobile lab was looking to work with members of the newsroom on an
experiment that would involve notifications and be replicable.
Jana replied with an opportunity from her reporting: the monthly jobs report

Our workflow for the experiment
After talking with the rest of the lab and Dominic Rushe, Jana’s editor, and figuring
out the technical format type and timeline with the lab, we set up a routine for the
week before the report.
Wednesday before the jobs report: meet together to discuss what Jana expected
from the upcoming jobs report
Thursday: Jana completes a template of the notifications text in a Google doc,
Madeline reads, simplifies and makes sure it will fit with the notification format
Friday morning, 8am: Jana, and mobile team gather to fill in final jobs report
numbers and send

We did this for six months and learned a lot
But specifically about collaboration, here’s what made this work:
Have clear goals: they were, 1. Test notifications 2. Build a replicable experiment
3. Tie into Jana’s existing work
The approach to collaboration is critical: there are lessons for both product and
editorial
For product: Say what you are looking for and be available to talk it through
For editorial: Pitch, and be open to trying something new
Set expectations well: Set an end game goal that ties in with the original aims. In
this case, testing the concept, not traffic, was the immediate goal

Great things came from this pretty small experiment
We got a lot of foundational knowledge about notifications that was used for the
entirety of the lab
We successfully worked ourselves into Jana’s reporting, and found a new way to
tell that story
In analyzing the experiments, we had conversations about the audience and who
the alerts were for, that helped us to scope out additional reporting and
experimentation

Analyzing Success of Mobile Innovation Projects
March 2018 by Lynette Chen

1. How does one approach analyzing success for innovation projects?
1. What is unique about analyzing the results of mobile experiments vs. day-to-
day newsroom projects?
1. What are the best practices for implementing analytics for innovation work?
21
A Clear Difference
#gmilday

Higher engagement with the website does not equate to a better
experience with experiments.
• Sessions
• Pageviews
• Time on site
• Conversions
22
Challenges with Established Web Metrics
#gmilday

How are users engaging?
23
A New Metric: Net Interaction Rate
Signals whether or not the experiment was a success based on how positive or negative the
experience was based on types of interactions.
Positive Engagements - Negative Engagements
Total Opportunities to Engage
Net Interaction Rate
#gmilday

24
Qualitative Surveys
Quantitative Data Qualitative DataEngagement
Behavior
User
Opinion
#gmilday

Analyzing the Leaderboard alerts
• Trackable user interactions:
• Tapping on the notification itself
• Tap on leaderboard button
• Tap on manage updates
• Swipe to dismiss
25
The Olympics Notification Alerts
#gmilday

Positive: Taps, Leaderboard Taps, Manage Update Taps
Negative: Dismisses
26
The Olympics: Value of the Net Interaction Rate
#gmilday

New survey question: “If you dismissed the alert, what was the most common reason? “
27
The Olympics: Evaluating Success
Are dismisses actually negative?
84%
#gmilday

28
The Analytics Process
Step 7
Step 1
Discuss Success
Tracking
Requirements Analyze Results
Success
Framework
QA Tracking
Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 6Step 5
Adjust / Evolve
#gmilday

29
Thank you!
Lynette Chen | MaassMedia Senior Consultant
lchen@maassmedia.com
@huirastic
Greg Kaminski| MaassMedia Analytics Director
gkaminski@maassmedia.com
@tan_cardigan
#gmilday

Multimedia with Podcasts
Dylan Greif, product designer

Podcasts and images and links. Oh my!
Dylan Greif, product designer

Mixing media is nothing new

The Nuremberg Chronicle is an illustrated biblical paraphrase and world history that follows the story
of human history related in the Bible. Published in 1493 by Anton Koberger

Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud

Principles of Uncertainty by Maira Kalman, 2007

Her Long Black Hair by Janet Cardiff, 2004

“If you enjoyed this podcast episode, you
can get bonus photos, maps, and links
by visiting our website at
youwontvisitthispage.com”

Images and audio can
go together.

Images and audio can
go together.
on the web podcasts

It’s also about the multiple contexts
users will typically find themselves in
when engaging with different media.

Are the media contexts
compatible?

• Player on the web for easy discovery and sharing
• Player with multimedia and link integration
• Player with push notifications
• Player with mid-chapter sectioning

How do they all fit together in
any given user context?

So, you’re the one who
makes it all look good.”
“

YOU KNOW IT.

YOU KNOW IT.
Well, my current
goal is to play out
the UX options for
these different
features to help the
team better see,
discuss, and
determine an
ultimate direction.

Multimedia NotificationsChapteringWeb discovery

“Yes”

“Awesome”

This direction helped a lot fall in place
• Media shared in chat thread paradigm
• Notifications follow sms msg paradigm
• Other features would take a back seat
• It just felt right.

Mobile messaging is a way of
sharing multimedia in a
cross-context context.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1E8iycw4LD96vNlEoXe99wTkPBSmLMqYY/view?usp=sharing

https://www.theguardian.com/strangebird

• 88% of traffic came from referral links
• 27% of total sessions resulted in a podcast play
• 32% of listeners played more than 75% of the episode
• 97% of respondents would consider listening to this format again.

How can we continue to make these
media contexts a consideration
creating the content itself?

Thank you!

Smarticles
Different approaches to Smarticles

What are Smarticles?
Smarticles break up stories into their key
elements and only present readers with
the parts of a story that are relevant to
them.
Using an algorithmic weighting system,
Smarticles hide and resurface elements
of a story over time to meet the reader’s
needs.

Smarticles
● Collaboration across disciplines
● We ran five experiments
● Iterate each time through user feedback and collected learnings.

Inception

Inception
United story

Inception
Previous mock-up by The Guardian

The appeal

The appeal
Prevent journalists from re-writing
the same story over and over again

The appeal
Editorial and Production
Workflow

The appeal
Navigating through an entire
story is cumbersome

The appeal
Better reading experience

The process

Collaboration

Collaboration
Design and
development
Reader
experience
Editorial

Collaboration
Dynamic Naming & Dating
● Problem: How do we work out naming and dating formatting?
● Solution: A dynamic system that changes depending on the layout of the
atoms the reader sees.

Collaboration
Collapsed groups
● Problem: Information that felt
relevant but not necessary?
● Solution: Collapse related atoms to
hide relevant but not necessary
information

Collaboration
Our users helped us too:
● Notifications tied to updates
● Added related links for users who wanted to dig deeper
● Selecting the right stories

Takeaways

Takeaways
● Journalists should be more involved in the development of products
● Build what works
● Older demographic enjoyed this tool

Guardian Mobile Innovation Lab: Lab lightning talks

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