GBN Native App
Client
GB News
Role
9 months
Role
UX / UI Design
Responsabilities
- Competitor analysis
- Design system
- User Interview
- UX / UI Design
GB News everywhere you go
To build a fully responsive app that focuses on enhancing the brand image by aligning the app’s design with the company’s overall brand strategy and promoting a community feel with rich-media content coverage while offering a seamless user experience across any device or platform.
Challenges
- Improving performance
- Increasing revenue by integrating monetisation strategies such as more advertising and subscriptions
- Increase live views
- The redesign should be cost-effective and justify the resources invested in it by providing a positive ROI
- The redesign should not negatively impact the user experience, as this can lead to decreased engagement and retention.
High Level Goals
The goal of redesigning our mobile app will include improving user experience and navigation, increasing engagement and retention, and potentially incorporating new features such as personalised content.
Increase user engagement and retention through a more user-friendly and visually appealing design
Improve navigation and organisation of content to make it easier for users to find and access the content they’re interested in
Incorporate new features to enhance user experience
Increasing engagement by adding new features such as push notifications, personalization, and social sharing.
Increasing readership by making it easier
Monetizing the app by advertising or subscription options.
Impact
14.7K
Opt-in Only Installations
from Feb 2024 – Mar 2024
10°
Highest recorded position ever recorded, in News
Pre-migration avg ~20th and previous highest of 18th
25°
Highest recorded position ever recorded
Pre-migration avg ~50th and previous highest of 38th
Analysis of the current app
What our users are saying?
We started looking into our current app, to discover what our users are feeling about the app, and how that translates to numbers. Also, conducted an in-person interview to discover what are the key features they liked, what they disliked and what they thought about news apps.
Swot Analysis
Always working closely with different roles within our squad, we prioritized and structured together what were the phases of discovery:
Competitive Analysis
There are many features and layouts we like across the News and Broadcasting sector. Although we do want to deliver a unique app that clearly represents GB News, we must offer functionality that our end users are familiar with, can understand or learn quickly.
After an extend research, we created a score panel to help us understand where each of our competitors stand.
User Journey
The next step was to create the main journeys that our users would do to get to the main features, after some exercises and studies we defined the 5 main journeys that would happen on the app.
1.General
2. Discovery
3. Preferences
4. Login
5. Watch
Discovery
For several of these stages, intensive research was necessary to define the real need for each type of challenge we face daily. One of the formats that was very useful when blocks appeared was to come back to basics:
1.What the asset should / shouldn’t do
2. Ideas
3. Concerns
After this exercise and the documentation that was produced, the stakeholders had a full view of the possibilities we were proposing, helping them to make better decisions based on business goals.
Prioritization
With all information in hand, we define 10 key features that should be on the phase 1 release – scheduled for 6 months later – those features already existed on the website with some new additions.
1. A clean and user-friendly visual design that is easy on the eyes and easy to navigate for improved user experience.
2. Improved organisation of content, including live, catchup, articles, videos, channels, schedule, authors, presenters, shows.
3. Ability to customise feed – favouriting channels, authors, shows, presenters.
4. Ability to ‘save for later or download catchup episodes to watch while offline.
5. Integration with social media platforms for easy sharing of articles/episodes
6. Improved search function for finding specific articles or topics.
7. Commenting and discussion functionality to encourage engagement and community building.
8. Analytics and tracking to measure audience engagement and article performance.
9. Advertising and other monetisation options – option for users to subscribe to a premium service for additional content or features.
10. Enhanced user settings for improved accessibility
Wireframe
Based on multiple discovery sections the puzzle started to come together. However, on the wireframe stage, we notice that some journeys still need refinement, since many pages that exist on the website were there just for Google purposes.
So, we took a good look at the pages that were not necessary and adjusted combine pages where needed and even deleted some pages that were no longer necessary.
The images above are some of the wireframes that were build, and prototyped for testing purposes.
Design System
Most of the design system was the same as the website, but as we learned a lot from the website released 6 months before, it was time to make some adjustments. The labels gained a little bit of curve in one of the corners. The previews were changed to be full width to gain more text space, the float previews were changed to have a little curve on the edges too.
During this process, Flipside had already been selected as the agency that would develop the application for us, they brought some good ideas that we incorporated into the designs.
Output
The output was a smooth and elegant application, that combines live stream and news assets in a way that is new in the market. It helps the user to find any show, presenter, or topic very quickly and is aligned with GB News branding.
The full app is available at Apple and Google stores!
Lessons Learned
Comparable to other applications, this was a big one. Most of the publishers that are on TV also have a different app to live streaming. Combining these 2 different types of media required a curve learning of loads of testing and failure until we found the right balance between the worlds we would like to have on the application.
Vinicius Lanza 