Sinclair Broadcast’s digital division reaches 49.8 million unique visitors every month through its news outlets. Their recent acquisitions left them with an assortment of properties that used various publishing tools and user experiences. Our challenge was to create a world class digital experience across all properties, from Washington, D.C. to Spokane, Washington.
Once our team built a content management system to serve every newsroom, the content was centralized. The next step was to create a new front-end customer experience. The new experience was designed to be fully responsive across computers, tablets and phones and to more prominently feature photo, galleries and videos.
Once our team built a content management system to serve every newsroom, the content was centralized. The next step was to create a new front-end customer experience. The new experience was designed to be fully responsive across computers, tablets and phones and to more prominently feature photo, galleries and videos.
All 80+ stations were on the same platform and page views per session went up 500%.
The “home” and “section” pages received most of our attention during the initial rollout, and as a result, the content “story” pages actually saw a decrease in engagement. This was especially problematic since the vast majority of our users arrive on the “story” pages but then bounce.
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After discussing with stakeholders and doing competitive research it was time to prototype. I created multiple experiences, tested those experiences with individuals in the building, and reworked them several times before presenting to stakeholders again. Prototyping in this way ensures that the design is informed by user behavior.
As a team we decided to implement an infinite scroll approach. We worked out some bugs with a soft launch on two stations and then began a month long rollout to all of our stations. After the full rollout the results were in. Q1 2017 saw page views go up 21%, sessions go up 14% and users increase 10%. This validated that the new design of the story detail experience had positive results for our business.
