I’m reading the Steve Job biography at the moment. It’s so gripping! Here are some highlights about design. First Jony Ive, Much of the design process is a conversation… There are no formal design reviews, so there are no huge decision points. Instead, we can make the decisions fluid. Since we iterate every day and…… Continue reading Apple’s design secrets
Category: Product
Product Insights: Beyond Stats
I just stumbled across an old project idea while clearing out my GitHub profile. If there is one thing that will make your business stronger, it’s understanding your users better. There are lots of analytics tools which help with this, but they suffer from two big problems. People hate stats. People want stories, not stats. Stats…… Continue reading Product Insights: Beyond Stats
Personalization: the secret sauce
In my last post i discussed why personalization is a good thing. In this post i’ll talk about how to implement it. But first, here are some more reasons for personalization. To scroll through a day’s worth of Metro headlines on mobile would take 40 pages on an iPhone5. Metro users rarely use the site…… Continue reading Personalization: the secret sauce
News algorithms and how stories age
News is about what’s current, but different stories age at different rates. Some stories are relevant for weeks (such as Metro’s Ebola facts article). Some breaking stories are old within hours. At Metro we’ve been automating how stories drop down the page. Currently, there’s a “one site fits all” approach. It’s good, but it could…… Continue reading News algorithms and how stories age
Products and the art of winning
If Metro is going to beat the competition then we need to learn faster than them. We need to learn what users want. We need to identify our assumptions and validate them. It’s faster to validate an assumption than a whole feature or product. For Metrovision, our top three assumptions are: People prefer browsing with…… Continue reading Products and the art of winning
Making news feeds self-optimizing
The standard approach for self-optimising content is bandit testing – a sophisticated cousin of A/B testing. I suspect that on metro.co.uk we don’t get enough clicks for it to learn as fast as we need – we need our news feed to be fresh. Also, bandit testing is complex and doesn’t play nicely with caching.…… Continue reading Making news feeds self-optimizing
The secret sauce of the world’s biggest news site
The most popular news site in the world is MailOnline. The newspaper behind it, Daily Mail, is the most popular newspaper in the UK. I have a theory about what their secret sauce is. In 2008, neuro-psychologist David Rock published a model called SCARF. It describes 5 common ways to hack people’s motivation circuitry. It’s…… Continue reading The secret sauce of the world’s biggest news site
A “loyalty funnel” for news sites
At Metro we sometimes talk about taking a “sales funnel” approach to user loyalty. What would it look like? Maybe something like this… View an article Think the article is great (e.g. great enough to share on Facebook) View 2nd article within one week Think that article is great too “Sign-up” e.g. follow Metro on…… Continue reading A “loyalty funnel” for news sites
5 ways to improve your news site: tips from BuzzFeed, Upworthy and Huff Post
Upworthy “The right sidebar, paired with a minimal design, increased social shares by 28%.” (source) “when we added distractions, user sharing went down” (source) BuzzFeed “People got used to this idea that you had to dumb down content to be popular. In fact you’re more likely to spread smart content” (source) Huff Post Huff Post…… Continue reading 5 ways to improve your news site: tips from BuzzFeed, Upworthy and Huff Post
5 reasons why Metro.co.uk is the best news site… in the world!
1. It made Hoque cry with laughter << Hoque, before he watched this >> Dad on school run can’t help laughing at pupil’s slipping on ice 2. There’s always something surprising worth talking about The homeless woman who hid in a man’s closet for a year 3. It’s entertaining… it even makes the budget…… Continue reading 5 reasons why Metro.co.uk is the best news site… in the world!
How to rebrand content sites
Rebranding often goes hand in hand with a change in business strategy or content strategy. As my previous post discussed, big changes are risky. Incremental changes lets you validate you’re on the right track. Fortunately for content sites, content is relatively easy to experiment with. You can try out a new strategy on a small scale. We’ve…… Continue reading How to rebrand content sites