Shaping the best news app in Sweden
In 2016 the Swedish State television SVT wanted to improve their news app to make it quicker, more relevant with a simplistic user experience.
My role
Lead Product Designer – define and design new features for the News apps, where the largest contribution was Tab navigation system and improved Ipad experience. Another part was to improve product design with a new brand color system. I also created a new simplified icon style guide used for all SVT online channels connected to the new logo and typography.
KUDOS TO THE TEAM – Tobias Gärder Visual Designer, Elin Axelsson UX designer, and above all everyone in the News app team!
UX challenge
The old app was slow and not optimized for hand gestures, such as swipe and tap. It had low ratings in App Store and Google play and people complained to customer service a lot.
The version to the left is the old slow wrapper app. In 2016 a beta app was released. In 2017 we made a redesign and changed navigation system to tab navigation.
Solution
We needed to create a new native app that loaded content really fast. A basic simplified concept was defined that supported swipe and tap interactions.
We identified Android and iOS as our main platforms and hence built 2 apps. The first release was with basic functions. According to plan we iterated continuously and shipped new features like tab navigation, push notifications, rebranding and visual tweaks.
A year after the first release it was the news app in Sweden with highest rating in App Store! It also won the Swedish Design price 2019.
When we released the new navigation and brand update for Android users, they embraced it immediately!
Process
Key factors in the making of this app was a cross functional team working together from the start, who defined a clear vision and was more or less autonomous. My role as a Product designer was to understand the goals, perform a lot of user tests and work close to the team. My largest contribution was the tab navigation, push notifications and rebranding of the app. I also had the role of communicating insights to other stakeholders, ie management and all journalists.
We identified prioritised user needs and goal for the app early on in the process to help us keep focus.
We keept design guidelines to a minimum and used Sketch and Zeplin instead. Some generel rules was set though for colors and image formats.
To make users get a good overview and make the proportions good on Ipad and other tablets we used the same width on content. The only difference was the image ratio for top images on articles.
The power of User feedback
Since we wanted to build a simple, useable and loveable news app, we needed to make sure we got constant feedback from the users. There was a lot of UX research done before I came, with deep interviews and prototype tests early on. We built 2 beta apps to collect feedback on a code based prototype. The team was responsible to collect and act upon the feedback, to secure that we used a user centered process.
My contrubution was to set up a structure for regular user tests every 3rd week for the whole SVT. People in the team could observe how the users interacted to get insight of the main pain points.
The funny crazy people in the cross functional app team I worked with during my time at SVT.
Insights
I worked with the app during my time as a consultant for almost a year and came in when the team had defined the basic concept. I pushed the design together with the talented developers and PO and made it feel more native which was the right way to go. This is one of the products I’m most proud of. Me and the Product Owner also did a presentation on a Inspiration lunch at Valtech HQ about the journey after launch.
Learnings from things that didn’t go as planned:
I think we underestimated the need of certain features, such as the weather and using Ipad in landscape mode. As soon as we launched those features the ratings were on top again. Another area where we had confusion was around the branding. A couple of weeks before launch of the new app – SVT had decided to rebrand all services. After some time we took a bet on continue with launch plan only to rebrand it some weeks later. The idea built on that no-one would remember the difference 6 months later anyway. Also that’s in one way just business as usual with continuous releases with digital products.
Another area of friction we’re around ownership and that some units felt they we’re not invited to influence the product – namely the journalists. They felt the product was too simplistic and weren’t proud of it. We overcame that by inviting them more and earlier to let them give feedback and engage in features like Push notifications that we launched later. To bring them into the process where we performed user tests and presented the results to them made them better understand why certain decisions were made. So the lesson is to identify key stakeholders thouroughly to engage them in the process – that usually helps.