Dive Deeper Module
Helping readers go beyond the article
Why we did it
One of the company’s strategies is to encourage users to consume other content on other Yahoo verticals which will increase users loyalty and engagement.
The data also shows that; through ongoing research; most Yahoo users don’t browse through the other Yahoo products resulting in users drop off. For example Yahoo Finance users don’t go to Sports or Yahoo Sports users don’t go to Yahoo homepage. The strategy to address this problem was to create an ecosystem for all Yahoo products; News, Sports and Finance.
My Role
1 Lead designer (me)
1 Art Director
1 Lead product manager
1 Engineering lead + team
Our goal
• Provide users with contextual information to increase user satisfaction and return visits throughout all verticals
• Increase numbers of DAU
• Encourage users to explore more contextually relevant content, therefore increase users engagement
Introducing: X-Ray
We leverage the article pages being the most visited users to introduce this new module.
This module serves 3 types of entities; people/entertainment entity, stock ticker entity and athlete/sports team entity. With that information, we serve it into the articles on Yahoo homepage, Finance and Sports. We leverage the Yahoo backend system that powers Yahoo Search for the information and surface it to our users.
The idea is to let users dig deeper into the topics they like without leaving the page that they were on.
Leveraging Yahoo Design System
We leverage Yahoo Design System for design consistency, accessibility and faster development. We decided to keep the UI simple and really prioritize for the main CTA to be prominent so that users can focus on the content more when jumping from one vertical to another.
Reusable Components
Buttons, cards and link treatment are reusable to use for easier collaboration with other Yahoo Design Team.
Flexible Content
After rounds of user testing we found out that users have different needs. For example users who are more sports savvy would like to see the upcoming games and score faster than the players biography. We then work with engineering and product to have a flexible content hierarchy.
Setting up content logic
Working with engineering and product to work on a logic when to show certain content to users.
Yahoo Finance Collaboration & Adaptation
At the time, Yahoo Finance was pushing its premium service that catered to the finance savvy users. The Yahoo Finance team reached out to X-Ray team and leveraged the X-Ray module to test their premium content. The Finance design team then collaborated with us and were able to reuse a lot of existing components for faster testing and implementation.
Learnings & Reflection
Product market fit
Some findings we found after shipping X-Ray is that X-Ray can be a powerful tool in one area but struggling to get good engagement in another. For example, X-ray in Finance and Sports engagement is far more than in News. Our hypothesis is users who are more interested in Finance and Sports are more passionate to dig deeper in the topic therefore leading to better engagement overall.
Relevancy and accuracy are very important
Making sure that the X-Ray is accurate is also another work that the team needed to account for. Inaccuracy of the X-Ray is more prominent in the people entity and athlete entity. The entities sometimes share the same name but it’s not necessary the correct ones.
