Tags containing: "ux"

News UK launches V-Studio to create better mobile ad experiences

June 12, 2017 Peggy Anne Salz, Founder and Lead Analyst – Mobile Groove

News UK, whose brands include The Times, The Sunday Times, and The Sun newspapers as well as social video ad platform Unruly, has opened the doors of its new vertical video studio. The new V-Studio, which sits in News UK’s commercial division The Bridge, is a bid to boost the amount and quality of video on News UK-owned properties and elsewhere on the Web.

Naturally, V-Studio will both create vertical video advertising for its clients to distribute via its owned properties and platforms. However, it will also allow those same clients (for a fee) to distribute the mobile optimized videos across the Web.

The approach has raised concerns the vertical video studio aims to take on full-service digital agencies. However, while V-Studio certainly has the capabilities to do so, Milton Elias, head of mobile and video at News UK, says the strategy is to create, not compete. It’s all about producing “better video, better inventory and better engagement” to monetize an audience that has become “by default mobile-first,” he explains. Data that shows 91% of readers accessed The Sun newspaper on their mobile device in April, compared with 82% for The Times News UK. What’s more, The Sun also counted 8.7 million video views in the same month.

“Monetizing audiences and delivering a great user experience requires mobile video that has been created for mobile. That means thinking vertically,” Elias says. Easier said than done in a market where many brands somehow believe they can simply squeeze TV ads and assets onto a smaller screen, regardless of the user experience. “Effective mobile advertising needs video that was created for consumption on that device and fit for that purpose,” he adds.

This is where V-Studio comes in “offering clients and brands a canvas they can use to create vertical video assets seamlessly,” he explains. Less than a week after launch, Elias says the studio already boasts a “well-known luxry brand” as its first client, with more in the pipeline.

The top priority is to drive better results through higher engagement. The goal will be to enhance, rather than interrupt, the user experience. The seven video formats currently produced by the studio sit in the mobile scrolling flow, where users can choose to click on videos, or simply scroll past them.

Another focus of the V-Studio launch is harnessing News UK first party-data and touch points around content users engage with. This will allow marketers order to hone audience targeting and advertising relevancy . “In the beginning we’re selling them [ads] on a direct buy basis and we’re hoping to make that available on a programmatic guaranteed basis,” Elias says.

As he points out, the industry has seen a fundamental shift in how people consume media, particularly via mobile channels. Given that so much of today’s high impact ads are created for consumption on large horizontal screens, News UK wants to lead the charge in optimizing marketing messages for mobile engagement on its sites, and across the web.

Peggy Anne Salz is the Content Marketing Strategist and Chief Analyst of Mobile Groove, a top 50 influential technology site providing custom research to the global mobile industry and consulting to tech startups. Full disclosure: She is a frequent contributor to Forbes on the topic of mobile marketing, engagement and apps. Her work also regularly appears in a range of publications from Venture Beat to Harvard Business Review. Peggy is a top 30 Mobile Marketing influencer and a nine-time author based in Europe. Follow her @peggyanne.

Industry-Research

The new speed of mobile engagement

June 5, 2017 John Saroff, CEO—Chartbeat

Does improving page load time positively impact readership?

Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project was launched in February 2016 to address both the increasing bloat of web pages and the subsequent consequences of a diminished user experience for readers, publishers, and advertisers. By creating a platform from which media companies could publish clean, streamlined versions of their articles, AMP promised to speed up the average page load time and make it easier for visitors to stick around and read their content.

But how does it deliver on this promise, and what is the impact on consumer engagement?

The Effect on Publisher Traffic

Chartbeat pulled actual consumer behavior data across 360 sites using AMP and FIA from June 2016 to May 2017. Our research shows that, while usage rates and the subsequent number of articles consumed on each platform differs, it turns out that both AMP and FIA content have been receiving larger and larger shares of publishers’ mobile traffic, and at fairly equal rates. As of mid-May 2017, a typical publisher who implemented AMP saw 16% of all mobile traffic on their AMP content. Comparatively, publishers with FIA saw 14.8% of all mobile traffic on FIA content.

The Need for Speed

These days, web experiences are all about speed. Almost half (47%) of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less. Even more significantly, 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load, meaning they never reach the published content at all. So how are AMP and IA optimizing page load times?

Chartbeat analysis shows that AMP loads roughly four times faster than the standard mobile site experience, and Instant Articles load even more quickly. In fact, 88% of Instant Articles load too quickly for us to even register a load time. Now that’s fast.

This is a big deal, and proves that both initiatives are delivering on the promise of providing a much quicker load time to improve reader experience. And publishers are seeing the effects — with less time spent waiting for pages to load, consumers have more time freed up for engaging with content.

Better User Experience, More Engaged Readers

With so many distributed ways of finding content and such short consumer attention spans, every second counts. So how does AMP stack up?

Chartbeat’s data shows that readers engage with AMP content for 35% longer than standard mobile web content. They spend an average of 48 seconds with AMP content vs. 36 seconds with mobile web content when coming from search. The fact that readers are engaging for so much longer than they normally would suggests that user experience really does matter in catching and holding attention.

The Future of High Speed Mobile

One big question still remains: Will publishers continue to scale their efforts and should these high speed platforms become the mobile industry norm?

While the increase in engaged time for publishers who have adopted both AMP and FIA are compelling, the jury is still out on whether the end justifies the means. The numbers here demonstrate that consumers clearly value these optimized mobile experiences and this may just be the evidence we need to validate their potential. However, larger questions still remain around each on both publisher value and quality.

As publishers continue to use these platforms and readers continue to react, it will be interesting to see how AMP and Facebook IA evolve in the future – possibly in two completely different directions.

At the end of the day, visitors deserve a fast, clean, enjoyable reading experience where they spend most of their time – on mobile. And publishers can benefit from a more effective mobile environment where they can distribute and monetize content and scale their success. But at what cost? How can we make this win-win?

John Saroff is Chief Executive Officer of Chartbeat, a leading content intelligence platform used by more than 50,000 of the world’s top media properties in over 60 countries. He has worked on the cutting-edge of media and technology for 17+ years, setting the daily operations and business development agendas of companies as diverse as Google, NBC-Universal and vente-privee. John received his undergraduate degree in History from Haverford College and a joint degree in Law and Business from Columbia University.

Innovation

Bloomberg’s customer-centric design ethos

May 15, 2017 DCN

AIGA, the design industry’s oldest and largest professional membership association, recently honored Bloomberg with its 2017 Corporate Leadership Award. This award was established to recognize a perceptive and forward-thinking organization that has been instrumental in the advancement of design by applying the highest standards, as a matter of policy, as well as its role in exemplifying the highest design standards within its respective industry. In announcing this honor, AIGA cited Bloomberg’s history of design innovation and advancement of design on multiple fronts:

Bloomberg L.P. advances design on multiple fronts through its industry leading products and unique company culture. Starting with the groundbreaking design of the original flagship product, the Bloomberg Terminal, the design of media products such as Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg.com, and its innovative work spaces and sophisticated branding programs, design is integral to how the company operates and provides value to customers.

In conjunction with this milestone recognizing Bloomberg’s commitment to great design across all aspects of the company, we discussed the importance of design ethos with three experts who are heavily involved in the design of Bloomberg’s core Financial Products:

Fahd Arshad, head of User Experience (UX) design for financial products, Ali Jeffery, Visual Design Lead for the Bloomberg Professional service, and Mike Mallon, Engineering Manager in Bloomberg’s application toolkits group.

ALI JEFFERY: Bloomberg’s design philosophy is to lead, not to follow. We definitely have a very strong opinion and express it in all of the facets of design across Bloomberg.

FAHD ARSHAD: Our design ethos is to make sure we are being useful to our customers. Every time we sit down and design something, we start with questions like, “How is this going to help our customers do their jobs?” “Is it going to make them more efficient?” Then, everything else comes from that. It’s a classic case of function over form. And that starts all of our design conversations.

When we express a piece of information, it is going to be in your face. We utilize high contrast colors to enable our customers to pick out information from a lot of noise. I would probably argue that this is the hallmark of our design, especially when it comes to the visual aspect of it.

MIKE MALLON: We’re aiming for efficiency, trying to make everything fast for the users, but also make it fast and easy to learn new things. Both of those pieces are important. We need to support both our power users and people who are just getting started and aren’t familiar with things yet.

Does Bloomberg have a design hallmark or style?

ALI: Definitely, especially with our software. Our black and amber color scheme is our strongest hallmark. You can see it across the trading floor. You know which application is Bloomberg from very far away.

Amber is our base font color. A lot of systems you see today will use much more neutral tones. But the amber and black has really become who we are. And it’s something we protect as part of our brand.

Our keyboard’s yellow keys are also a part of our design presence and our recognizability across a trading floor. They became a unique feature for Bloomberg and something that we chose to highlight and see as part of our identity.

FAHD: The color scheme just became iconic. You’d walk onto the floor and you’d see a row of amber and black screens and you knew you were in a Bloomberg shop. It’s interesting how we’ve seen that evolve and some of our competitors have started picking it up. It became sort of the hallmark of being a financial superpower that you had a dark background. But we stayed with it, because that is our hallmark. That is our brand. And our customers love it.

How does design apply to your area of focus?

ALI: I think one of the things I’m the most proud of working on is the framework of our system. We are creating the building blocks for the rest of the company to design their software. We’re working on making the underlying toolkit that the applications rely on more user-friendly.

MIKE: My role is to implement the designs that the UX team comes up within our applications. A big piece of that is figuring out how we can be reactive to new designs. One of the most interesting things we do is bring users into our User Experience Lab and try new things out with them and then react to their feedback. Then, the thing that we actually release will be something that is really useful to actual clients who have tested it out.

FAHD: That extreme focus on customer needs is what drives our design language or design process. For that matter, we start each conversation with our business managers, for example, who are often subject matter experts. So each conversation about a design problem starts with, “What is it that we’re trying to solve?”

How is Bloomberg design different from how some other companies might view or articulate design?

FAHD: At Bloomberg, we don’t spend a lot of time looking at what other people do. We know what our goal is. We have customers that we need to satisfy. The one big difference I hear from other people is how much we cultivate our relationship with our clients and how willing our clients are to come in and help us improve our products. It’s non-trivial for a portfolio manager or trader who has different time commitments to give us an hour-and-a-half or two hours of their day and to come to our office and sit in the lab. We’re lucky that, as an organization, we have cultivated that amount of loyalty among our customers and that sense of shared mission.

MIKE: With our focus on efficiency, it’s not just what looks pretty on the screen, which is what a lot of companies use to define good design. That is, they open it up and ask “Is it aesthetically pleasing?” or “Is it pretty?”

Our whole philosophy is about showing all the functionality to the user – that is, making it very accessible, very easy for them to use. This may sometimes lead to screens that look complicated at first glance, and someone might say, “Wow, there’s a lot here.” But what we’re actually doing is putting all of that at the user’s fingertips right away.

How do Bloomberg’s customers influence design?

MIKE: Well, they’re part of the process. We try new things on a bunch of employees first, but then we always bring customers in to try it out before we actually build something and turn it into a product. This way, we actually know that what we’re building is valuable to them.

FAHD: We take whatever our hypothesis is, we talk to the subject matter experts and we express our findings as early designs. But we try and validate them with our customers, because our end goal is being purposeful in our designs and providing value to our customers.

A big part of the design process is all working towards a single understanding – talking to our customers, understanding their needs and then designing to them. Since our sales force is constantly in touch with them, we get a lot of feedback. This has caused us to really evolve our product. We have an underlying technology infrastructure that allows us to push new software out to our clients very quickly, so we’re able to react to any of their needs. It’s actually really beneficial for our clients.

Bloomberg was founded on bringing transparency to financial markets, how is that principle reflected in Bloomberg’s design?

ALI: We really never design for design’s sake. It’s always meant to address our customer’s needs. We’re trying to create a clear hierarchy. We’re trying to make sure that they can find and parse information as quickly as possible.

MIKE: I think transparency is very important in how we do design. One way we show transparency is by showing clients ahead of time what it is we’re going to build.

Another way that we’re very transparent is we try to release our designs across the whole Terminal. So, all customers get access to the same designs. They all get access to the same types of things. And we’re very transparent in that we’re releasing these different features to all our clients at the same time. Everyone gets the same benefit. And we keep them in the loop on what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.

FAHD: Today, there is such a wealth of data that people are drowning in it. The important part is not having access to data, necessarily, but paying attention to the right amount of data or the right kind of data. And that’s what I personally see as the definition of transparency today: surfacing what you need to know, when you need to know it, and why this is relevant to you.

The goal of our design process has to be to make our customers more efficient and more productive. If we keep doing that, we will continue to bring value to them and be useful to them. And that’s where we will continue to be successful.

Note: This interview is reprinted with permission from the Tech at Bloomberg blog.

Industry-Research

Mobile ad blocking on the rise. What’s that mean for digital publishers?

June 14, 2016 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

Ad blocking on desktop has been a thorn in the side of publishers for years, but it’s the advance of ad blocking on mobile and built into browsers – and the stunning growth trajectory of ad blocking usage across markets including China and India – that poses the greatest threat to digital media companies that depend on advertising for revenue.

This is the key takeaway of Adblocking Goes Mobile, a recent report published by Page Fair, a company working to mitigate ad blocking with the help of technology it claims addresses the speed, privacy, and UX issues that cause ad blocking in the first place. Drawing from research and analysis of ad blocking browsers and capabilities conducted in collaboration with app intelligence firm Priori Data, the report sheds important light on the factors driving the meteoric growth ad blocking around the globe.

To date the report points out that “at least 419 million people are blocking ads on smartphones.” That’s nearly twice the number of consumers blocking ads on desktops and PCs. Do the math, and 22% of the world’s 1.9 billion smartphone users are blocking ads on the mobile Web.

While mobile ad blocking browsers have become a mainstream technology, there are important differences in how and where consumers block ads in their content and news.

In fact, mobile ad blocking usage and mobile data infrastructure appear to be inextricably linked, with consumers in Asia-Pacific adopting ad blocking browsers as a way to curb bandwidth-eating ads, improve page load speeds and ultimately keep a lid on mobile data costs. Overall, over one-third (33%) of smartphone users in the region are blocking ads with the help of an ad blocking browser. The report estimates that as of March 2016, the region contained a whopping 55% of global smartphone users, but “93% of ad blocking browser usage.”

The mass adoption of ad blocking browsers in markets including China, India, Indonesia and Pakistan means massive problems for digital media serving those markets. As the report puts it: “Mobile ad is a serious threat to the future of media and journalism in emerging markets, where people are coming online

for the first time via relatively expensive or slow mobile connections.”

Ad blocking usage in North America and Europe is not as widespread, thanks to developed mobile data infrastructure and affordable data plans. But there are also distinct differences. Ad blocking browsers are popular in Europe, while content blocking apps (apps that block ads in web pages viewed via a Safari browser on Apple’s iOS 9 Apple devices, for example) are 3x more popular in North America than in Europe.

In total (as of March 2016) the report reckons there were 14 million monthly active users of ad blocking browsers in Europe and North America. In total, 4.9 million content blocking and in-app ad blocking apps were downloaded from app stores in Europe and North America since September 2014.

The mature mobile markets of North America and Europe are marked by slow, but steady adoption of ad blocking browsers and content blocking apps. It’s the calm before the storm as the range of ad blocking tech continues on an impressive growth trajectory. The report identified an incredible 229 different content blocking apps on Apple iOS alone. Expect the numbers to skyrocket now that Samsung will make good on its promise that the default browser on its Android devices will support its version of content blocking. Growth of ad blocking tech will also see a huge boost as more browsers (not just operating systems) add ad blocking support and make it easier for consumers to configure their preferences.

It’s important to have a report that draws from empirical data, not user surveys, to understand the increasingly complex landscape of mobile ad blocking technology. Now it’s up to the media and publishing industry to use this report as a starting point to address the root causes and issues that are convincing consumer to use adblockers in the first place.

Fortunately, the report takes the first steps, inviting industry leaders and associations – including Digital Content Next – to weigh in with their opinions on the rise of ad blocking technology and why a focus on delivering a better user/reader advertising experience should be top of mind with all digital media companies and brands.

But the elephant in the room is not the quality of ads but the disconnect between how the industry approaches monetization and what they should really value. Perhaps David Chavern, CEO, Newspaper Association of America, sums it up best: “We [also] measure digital ads by a metric — “impressions” — that has no real meaning or value. If we don’t fix these problems, and we allow ad blockers to take over, then we will be left with small, subscription models that will exclude large portions of the public. Not being able to afford HBO is one thing. Not being able to afford quality news would be a much more serious problem.”

Innovation | Revenue

About.com’s Data-driven Overhaul

September 4, 2014 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

About.com debuted a major redesign this week, which CRO Brian Colbert says was, “long overdue.” While the site holds the enviable number 15 spot on Comscore’s list of most trafficked websites, About.com had fallen behind on design, usability, social and the ability to effectively monetize its traffic. “And if you aren’t innovating,” says Colbert, “you are falling behind.”

One significant challenge in undertaking an overhaul is what has always been one of About.com’s strengths: its deep well of content. About.com boasts 3.5 million pieces of content covering about 1,000 topics. “We amassed so many assets over time and we couldn’t just flip the switch all at once, so we opted for a phased rollout.”

Starting with a redesigned homepage in July, then working through the most popular verticals, Colbert says they were able to evaluate what the users responded to and what was most effective from an advertising standpoint “We made tweaks and modifications based on our analysis as we went. So we feel pretty confident of our major release Tuesday, and we rolled out the final two channels Wednesday.”

User Experience and Relevant Content
What’s readily apparent is that the new site has a much more modern, visual sensibility. “The content was always good,” says Colbert, “but it wasn’t presented in the most elegant way. In fact, the user experience had become really dated.”

In terms of content, Colbart says About.com will continue to use “a lot of the strategy that has worked well for us in the past with our narrowly focused experts that run a wide gamut of topics.” However the new site reflects an increased emphasis on social sharing and on building topic-centric user destinations. Each vertical has its own dedicated general manager and a customized social strategy. In the near future, About.com’s GMs will be making a concerted effort to seek out “personalities in their verticals who will bring more credibility and panache.”

Though the vertical landing pages and article templates are very similar at launch, according to Colbert over time they will begin to look more distinct. “The Money section will include rate tables and stock tickers; each will feel like their endemic brethren,” he said. The objective is to become less reliant on search to drive the site’s traffic and to become a place that enthusiasts and information-seekers routinely rely on.

Data-driven Relevance
Another objective of this relaunch is increasing users’ time spent on About.com by serving its 85 million daily visitors relevant content once they’ve found their way to the site. “We are aggressively surfacing related content. Recirculation is a real focus for us.” This goal is underpinned by About.com’s increased emphasis on data analysis, which includes a three-person (and growing) data science team. Colbert says their efforts have yielded a new understanding of how users interact with About.com’s content. “We’ve developed a proprietary tool that helps us understand which articles are related to each other, even if they may not seem relevant at first.” For example, if you are “reading up on million dollar investments, you might also want to read an article on Cayman travel.”

This data focus will also help About.com better monetize its audience by offering advertisers a better context for their messages so that they can be included on areas of the site where one might not immediately think to look – essentially in-house behavioral targeting.

In addition, About.com is betting heavily on content marketing. “That term gets tossed around a lot these days, but to us it means enabling advertisers to surround their content with ours in a way that makes it all relevant. We are very well positioned to take advantage of native and do it right because the nature of our content lends itself to native.” Colbert cites a current native campaign on How to Train for a Long Hike by the Merrell shoe company that is running in the Hiking section. “They already have authenticity in the space so users feel the advertiser plays a positive role through content. Done right, native should feel additive to the user experience.”

And in 2015, look for a major video push from About.com. Colbert says they have a new studio and are actively producing a significant volume of “video that will enhance the user experience.” With the relaunch and future plans, Colbert says that user experience will not be measured by clicks alone. “We are judging the effectiveness and success of the redesign through engagement. We want people to visit more often, stick around longer and do more on the site.”