The ask

Create an innovative experience for readers to quickly digest unique perspectives on issues that matters to them.

Gannett tapped Huge's DC office to help rethink the digital experience for both mobile and responsive experience for USA Today. A small team of designers was deployed on site to work along side our client and internal experince design team using a lean agile methodology, rapid prototyping and real time iteration to find best-in-class solutions for their users.

Headwind #1: Competing for the attention of our new segments. USA Today’s website and apps are secondary to preferred aggregators.

Reinventing the content experience: We started with bold design exploration which set up for moments of visual impact that supported a highly useable and readable editorial experience.

Headwind #2: The current mobile template was inflexible and limited content creators while delivering a poor user experience to the readers.

Our Goal: Make USA Today top-of-mind in America through a perceptive experience that exposes users to diverse but relevant perspectives.

Our Solution: Leverage Gannett’s access to 109 local newspapers to provide users with a one of a kind experience that allows them to quickly digest unique perspectives across the country on issues that matters to them.

The work

Mobile innovation work.

We began a condensed sprint using rapid prototyping to explore possible solutions to the business challenge and end-user need described above. We challenged ourselves to explore the ways in which Gannett could leverage the strengths and differentiators of the USA TODAY Network.

Working within the guidelines of the original product brief we were asked to created 5 concepts for the USA TODAY Network. In the end, we created over 20+ concepts. The curated ideas below fell most in-line with the strategy and business objectives.

Concept 1: Pulse Of The Nation

A unique digital experience that lets users observe how different parts of the country are talking about a national issue. We do this by surfacing the most popular content across the USAT Network (not limited to usatoday.com) written about a national issue or topic.

Concept 2: Topic Timeline

News develops over time as stories build into larger topics and national conversations. Another way to connect the breadth of USAT Network stories is using the element of time. A user interested in sports updates may want to follow developments as they come in what editors are saying as well as expert opinions on the potential outcome of the game.

Concept 3: Add To Queue

As a further exploration of how to keep users engaged through a story-reading experience, we created Add to Queue. Many competitor websites offer users the option to “save” stories they’d like to read later, but statistics show that users rarely, if ever, go back to their “saved” articles once they’ve left the initial article page.

Concept 4: Personal Hub

As technology evolves to allow us to more easily tailor news content to the individual, we thought through a concept called Personal Hub. Users can access their Personal Hub via an ever-present icon in the top right corner of their screen that indicates there are 5 headlines picked specifically for their interests.

Concept 5: Connections

Connections is a supplementary way to navigate topics related to a story in a more visually engaging way. Clicking on a new topic tag within this view reveals a reel of stories with the same topic tag to draw the user into a continued click stream of connected stories.