Economist app tour
Improving The Economist's app pre-subscription onboarding experience by educating new users about our product features and benefits.
BACKGROUND
In the last several years, The Economist started undergoing a digital transformation that involves initiatives to help Economist subscribers better consume content digitally. This included the launch of a new mobile app that empowers readers to moderate and customize their content consumption.
One of the biggest concerns Economist readers experience is feeling overwhelmed by the amount of content we provide them on a weekly basis. We know from user interviews that this is one of the main reasons readers choose to cancel their subscriptions– to free themselves from the guilt of not getting through the entire weekly magazine.
The new app was developed to offer readers a variety of ways to manage their content consumption. This includes reading articles on our Today page and listening to our audio edition–helping users feel like they can enjoy The Economist without the pressure of reading the magazine cover to cover.
THE TIMELINE
1-2 weeks of research, 1--2 weeks of design & the engineering build.
THE TEAM
Two UX & one UI designer, a delivery manager, and several engineers.
THE RESULTS
Users perceived the app to be of overall higher value + price per month.
MY ROLE
I worked as one of the main UX designers for this project and collaborated with another UX designer and UI designer to develop the interface and experience.
We also worked closely with our product and delivery managers. Together, we supported app developers, developed assets, and set parameters for the project build.
Activities included: Conducting initial research, including competitor research & benchmarking; mapping user flows for various use cases; developing several wireframe concepts; conducting user tests and interviews with new and existing app users; and finalising our final concept and conducting additional usability testing before proceeding to build.
Tools: Sketch, Figma, Invision, Validately, Apptentive, Miro
DEFINING THE PROBLEM
Although the new app offers a unique reading and listening experience to subscribers, we started to find that our users were having trouble discovering all that it has to offer. We kept hearing from users that they could no longer access the Weekly magazine as they could in our old app (they can) and that it was only months after starting to use the app that they realized that all articles have an audio offering.
We realized that we were not helping users in the discovery process, and new potential subscribers who downloaded the app had no idea what was available to them before deciding to subscribe.
New users frequently complained about not being able to sample or explore the app, since the app has a hard paywall.
At the same time, we frequently heard from users how much they enjoy certain features, such as our audio edition.
THE PROCESS
To start, we explored various options as to how we could introduce our users to our app. We went through past interviews with current Economist subscribers and app users to uncover some of the frustrations and challenges subscribers felt when using our app.
One of our main findings was that readers who start using our app uncovered features they were interested in months after initially interacting with it. One user said:
"It was starting to feel like a chore to read through all of these articles. But about three months after subscribing I noticed you can listen to them, and that's how I get through them now."
We began to collect these insights to inform initial concepts. We also analyze quantitative data on the app features that users highly engage with.
Next, we conducted competitor research and app benchmarking to understand how some of our competitors introduce users to their app. We found that a simple, but effective solution was introducing an app tour at first open.
After completing initial user research and benchmarking, we established use cases and developed journeys. This enabled us to better scope out what was possible for this project, and the goals we wanted to achieve for our users.
Another key focus for this project was to better inform users about push notifications and to motivate them to enable them on our app. With push notifications, we inform users about new available content and features.
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Finally, we started to sketch and wireframe various concepts. We developed three wireframe concepts, which featured varied imagery, copy, and a different order of presenting content to test with users. Although the differences between each were small, the impact that copy had on user perceptions of the app was significant. We uncovered this by performing brief usability tests, including moderated and unmoderated interviews, with subscribers and non-subscribers.
These various interviews (pictured above) allowed us to identify which approach resonated most with users, and aided them in the app discovery process. We organized and presented these findings to the team, and proceeded to develop high-fidelity designs based on these findings, which we re-tested with users before going into build.
Action-driven copy proved to be more compelling
Overall, the prototype with action-driven copy performed best among all three, with users remarking that it was interesting, useful, informative, and clear.
Action-drive copy led to more users enabling push
In user testing, users rated that they would be more likely to enable push notification when they saw prototypes with action-driven copy.
Marketing-driven copy performed worst
Users had trouble with feature comprehension, remarking that the experience felt overwhelming and confusing.
Walkthrough was successful in increasing feature awareness
Many users remarked being most interested in being able to listen to articles and access podcast episodes from the app.
Users perceived the app the be of higher value & price
Users who interacted with the app without the walkthrough estimated it to be an average $6.50/month. Those who saw the walkthrough estimated it to be an average of $12.30/month.
"Morning news snippets, audio articles read by news broadcasters, access to all the best Economist articles."
LESSONS LEARNED
This was a fun project for the whole team– getting to interact with users and understand where we could better help them understand our app was insightful and useful. Putting this together was also quite interesting in retrospect– looking back, the process was definitely messier than it looks! There's always a lot of back and forth between different teams and a lot of stakeholders get involved. But in general, this is how we developed out this project.
In the future, we'd like to conduct further testing, perhaps through focus groups and additional user interviews, to identify where some of the design pitfalls are in the app that is not allowing users to quickly discover certain features. We will also track overall user satisfaction, app reviews, and subscription rates to see how the app tour performs live in the app.
