Spectrum News Politics Hub
Pushing the envelope of our Elections experience in advance of the 2024 presidential election.
Background
For a few days every year, our agency team unites together in a hackathon style to solve problems that could create value for the team, business, and/or customer. Typically, these are projects that are outside the established roadmap for our clients. This year, I worked on a cross-functional team to ideate around improvements for our Politics Hub experience in advance of the 2024 General Election.
Duration
48 hours
My Role
Lead Product Designer
Deliverables
Competitive Research, UX Strategy, High-Fidelity UI Designs
Our customers rely on Spectrum News to keep them informed and count on us to provide unbiased local reporting and programming. With many loud and biased sources throughout the market, providing impartial political coverage remains the most important value to protect. In 2020, The Spectrum News Politics Hub was developed as a personalized tool to support political coverage and race results and also allows users to engage, feel informed, and partake in their local government with confidence.
Consistently, we’ve found that if users engaged with political content, they spent twice as long in the app and came back an additional two times on average versus non-politics users. This shows us that political consumers are high-value, heavily engaged app users.
Why is Politics Hub so important?
Finding our problem area
A game changer for elections
Previous usability testing showed that 2/3 of participants found the live election results to be the most valuable feature of Politics Hub. This particularly applied to local elections as most other outlets did not offer this level of coverage. We decided to focus on enhancing the live results experience with the new Live Activity feature on iOS with the goal of increasing user engagement with the Spectrum News mobile app.
We would like to assume that users are coming to our app and spending time consuming news linearly. But, in practicality, our customers are busy and we understand they’re often multitasking while consuming the news - wether its catching up on top headlines during a train ride home or listening to the evening news while they’re preparing dinner. Our primary challenge has never been what info to deliver but how we can deliver it.
When we think about news in general, the push notification channel makes sense for updates. Users can browse their notifications at a glance during their day and denote key stories they want to catch up on later. For an election, updates are much more timely and the push notification channel is:
Crowded—with updates lost in a sea of promos & coupons.
Quickly out-of-date—with stale updates sometimes misleading users.
Manual—with updates requiring manual creation by producers.
Live Activities will allow us to utilize a new delivery channel; one that is more prominent and always up-to-date. This will be a game changer for users who want to keep up to date with live election results without digging through their apps during a busy day.
Each Live Activity has four possible presentations depending on where it appears and can change states based on the activity’s journey. Here’s a very simple view of an election’s journey.
In considering the 8-hour time limit of a Live Activity and the stages of a basic election, I decided on one key state, with two brief states on each side:
Countdown Stage: Brief, 10 minute countdown until polls will close.
Ballot Counting Stage: Beginning when polls close, the widget will count the votes of each candidate.
Final Score Stage: Brief, ending state after winner has been announced to ensure users see the final count and winner.
Additionally, some races have two candidates and others have more than four. This led to the decision to treat these races different visually and landed us on a total of 24 unique Live Activities.
Unlimited permutations
Spectrum News represents a number of markets across the country with a variety of races. If we enabled Live Activities for all races, our customers would be inundated with election results - and potentially ones that are not relevant to them. This presented a unique challenge as we asked ourselves:
How we might educate users on the ability to and value of enabling Live Activities for a race they are interested in?
It quickly made sense to add a tool tip or brief explanation within the live election results experience where you would enable or disable this functionality. However, while politics users are more engaged, they still represent a smaller percentage of our overall user base. Because of this, We also decided on a full screen modal on app launch after the functionality was launched. This approach is two-fold:
Bring a refreshed awareness to the general politics experience
Provide a more in-depth explanation of this new functionality given that iOS users are still new to Live Activities in general
Selecting relevant races
Embrace your limitations:
Designing Live Activities is the ultimate exercise in prioritization-by-concision with the minimal state presenting the most unique challenge: How do you give users the critical information they need if you only have a 36px circle? In early iterations, I found myself adding as much information as I possibly could to these small widgets, but after critique, found that prioritizing certain content and its visualization allowed us to better serve our users.
Don’t forget about accessibility:
While it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of a new feature and functionality, that’s never a reason to put accessibility requirements to the side. We tested color contrast, native iOS font scaling and considered VoiceOver functionality to ensure this feature will be universally available to all users.