The Concepts

I created a selection of concepts that would address the goal of increasing sharing with different strategies organized from lowest to highest amount of engineering lift for product design, product and newsroom leadership to evaluate.

• Elevate share call to action the article action hierarchy

  • Reasoning: share and gift actions already exist in two places on our article pages. Rather than creating more possibly unnecessary opportunities for readers to click to share, we can elevate those buttons place in the hierarchy by visually differentiating.

  • pros: least amount of lift, doesn’t introduce anything new to our already packed article pages while elevating what we already have.

  • cons: if the current button locations or misunderstanding what gift/sharing means are causing users to not interact with share, those foes not solve those issues.

• Establish the social value of sharing

  • Reasoning: Commonly found on social media sites, users are often influenced by the number of people that have already interacted with a piece of content, think instagram likes, reddit voting etc. When a post already has a lot of interactions users are quicker to share the post with their own network because of it’s virality. We could tap into this pattern for our share action by labeling articles that have high sharing engagement and including the number of shares of that article.

  • pros: Creates a visual pattern with the label and share action that could scale easily to other surfaces (homepage, app, section fronts). It leverages a pattern that has shown to be successful on other sites to increase user engagement.

  • cons: If there are not many shares on an article, could that dissuade readers from reading or sharing that article.

• Create persistent call to action for easy access

  • Reasoning: Giving readers easy, continuous access to sharing will increase shares by allowing readers to access it any times they need it, rather than only at the beginning and end of the page.

  • pros: we can create bespoke logic for when to prompt readers with share popovers, nudgeing them only when it would be most effective. It also does not have to be tied to a physical point in an article like an inline module would, and doesn’t affect the article content at all.

  • cons: with our current mweb experience, it is difficult to create persistent or sticky pop overs because of our softwalls, banners and ads.

• Eye-catching inline nudge

  • Reasoning: Prompting readers to share with a combination of visual interest and snappy language in the body of the article will make the prompt more visible, and readers more likely to engage if we prompt at a time where they’ve read enough to know they like the article without being too far past the drop off point for most users.

  • pros: we can create logic for when to show readers the inline modile, it doesn’t affect or interact with our soft-walls, ads and other in-article modules. Also, the space for copy text will allow us to communicate a value proposition to the reader to make it more enticing to engage with than a stand alone button.

  • cons: tied to a specific point in the article, so if the reader never reads to that point they won’t see it. We have many other inline call to actions in the article, so we’d need to come up with logic to help prioritize which readers are shown which prompts.

• Introduce a scrolled state for the navigation bar

  • Reasoning: Currently, the global navigation bar is static and does not change at all from when the user loads the page to scrolling. Introducing a scrolling state for our site navigation bar that would include the most important actions for a reader when they are actively scrolling the page (like share, listen and open app) would increase engagement with those actions as they are constantly in reach when a user may need them without interrupt the reading experience with a new module.

  • pros: Wed don’t currently have a unique scrolling state for our navigation bar, this is a good opportunity to innovate and combine multiple of our high profile initiatives for the quarter in one. Our current navigation bar would still exist, just only when the user is at the top of the article page. This is also possible research opportunity to determine which actions are most important for users to quickly access while they are actively reading.

  • cons: This has the largest lift of any of the concepts and introduces a whole new navigation bar. This could disrupt some of the other projects to address these initiatives that the team already has in motion. This change would also require the most buy-in from multiple different teams.

During the presentation of these concepts I hypothesized that a one-fits all approach may not be the best solution to address all aspects of this project, suggesting that a staged and multi-solution approach using a combination of the concepts above would most likely give us the best outcome.