Spectrum News
iOS & Android
“32% of young Americans say they never trust the media.
However, they do trust local [news] more than social media & Wall Street.”
Source: The Institute of Politics at Harvard
We’ll take it.
Spectrum News - a child brand within the telecom giant, Spectrum – is in the business of local news, weather, sports, and politics.
The customer type – both a news novice and news enthusiast – trusts local news over any other news source.
We set out to elevate the local news “on-the-go” experience for those communities.
The Problem Space
Spectrum News has over 41 local news outlets throughout the country, spanning 31M customers. Before the app was launched in the summer of 2020, customers had few options to engage with local news, outside of traditional cable television.
We also knew about 1M people visited the Spectrum News websites per week. But the mobile app, at the time, was not performing anywhere near those numbers.
The mobile app was born from a customer demand – to get local news and weather, on the go, in the most user-friendly way.
My Role
Director of Product Design
In December 2019, had the opportunity to build and lead a newly-minted product design team within Charter’s internal agency. Under our portfolio, we would soon design and manage a product suite of web, native mobile, and TV products. The team consisted of designers, researchers, content designers, accessibility architects, engineers, and product owners. I also worked with a handful of executive stakeholders to not only evangelize design’s role in product definition, but also invite them into the design process.
When we kicked off this project, we had just completed a reorg that decentralized product design as a practice. Alongside the few lone soldiers, our team of eight became embedded within a larger engineering group. We brought new people, new processes, new tools, and a different vision for how to build a product.
Before us, there was a guy named Ted who designed all of the digital products for Spectrum News. Sorry, Ted – I hope you’re well!
The Challenge: To Create a Concierge Service for News in Six Months
Our business partners kept reiterating: “We want the app to be the concierge of news for our customers.”
We took that concept and ran with it. To us, concierge meant always anticipating the needs of our users, making content discoverable when they wanted it, and politely welcoming them back throughout their day.
Product Vision
Our team conducted a brand sprint that brought together several executives within the organization. The one-day sprint was meant to guide the brand direction for the new frontier of digital products.
Why: To save democracy (truly, this was the north-star vision statement for the brand)
How: To use the customer’s location (hyper-local location) in a tactful way
What: To deliver a trusted experience that was lacking amongst local news at the time
HMW
Identifying the lowest effort, highest impact features
How could we personally engage the user through content?
Hyper-local product offering
The Approach
Discovery
We started with a design sprint. We brought a cross-functional team of editors, executives, engineers, and designers to Sprint for one week. The result was a user-tested prototype that validated the design goals.
Surveys, interviews, market research, and user testing answered a few generative questions that would help in feature mapping:
58% of people say they reach for their phone - over the web, cable TV, the radio, or a newspaper - when getting information about news, politics, weather, and traffic.
97% of people check their phone multiple times a day to access news content – compared to once per day, every few days, every few weeks, and once per month.
70% of people check multiple times a day to access political content.
33% of people check multiple times per day to access weather content, where as the majority just check the weather once per day (53%)
The user-tested prototype from the initial design sprint.
Ideate: MVP Features
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Homescreen
This feed would be editorially configured with local news per the region.
We learned that a typical user could return to this homepage several times throughout their day to check the news and gather headlines. The need to maintain a simple, editorially controlled interface for this home screen was key.
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Weather
Weather is the news in many areas of the country. The team had invested in a robust weather API that brought in complex weather data, so the need to create a concise experience that spoke to both weather enthusiasts and the average American was the challenge.
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Articles
The content created in this app was the core pillar. We leaned on Adobe Experience Manager as the CMS and designed the article experience around the back-end publishing flow.
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Live TV
Spectrum News was (and still is) primarily a linear TV channel. We brought that live TV experience into the main navigation so users could watch live news. However, we quickly noticed users were not watching live TV on their mobile phone. We kept the experience but revised the vision for the JTBD.
Build to Launch
At this time, executive leadership played the role of “Product” simply due to the high-level decision making being done by some of the highest levels of leadership within the organization.
The iteration process between design, the business/Product, and engineering was rapid, and a bit chaotic, near the end of the build, largely because a core voice was missing from the discovery process: the journalists creating the content.
The team did rapid, iterative sprints for two months leading up to a July, 2020 launch to ensure the product met the needs of the editorial team.
We launched iOS first, and then quickly thereafter, launched Android.
What We Learned
Customers love our app; Within the first several months of launch, we had 1M downloads of the app from the app store
The iOS app star rating went from 2.3 stars to 4.7 stars within the first year of life
Customers wanted a better weather experience. Weather is the news in many areas of the country and we removed features from the old weather experience to meet deadline. This hurt our app store ratings, initially. We ended up prioritizing weather enhancements in later sprints.
