Designing an editorial tool to help readers track story updates

Improving “trackers”

A “tracker” is an article format used by Industry Dive's publications to help readers track story developments and trends in an industry. Reporters and editors use trackers to compile small insights that tell a larger story (like tracking healthcare worker strikes) or to compile resource information (like industry conferences in the upcoming year).

Prior to this project, Industry Dive's data & graphics team manually created trackers for reporters and editors, which was time-consuming and relied on a Google Sheets integration, which frequently broke. As we worked to move trackers into our CMS instead, we also wanted to revisit the presentation of the story format and optimize it to maximize reader engagement and growth.

Initially, I focused on the reader-facing site design while our product design director pursued the CMS interface. Later, I was responsible for enhancements to both the reader-facing template and the editorial-facing CMS.

Identifying reader & newsroom needs

We started by conducting user interviews with reporters, editors, newsroom leadership, and data & graphics team members to understand how they use trackers, why they would choose to use a tracker instead of another article format, and feedback they'd gotten from audiences. We also audited previously published trackers to identify features we should templatize.

From this, we learned:

• On the audience side, readers would need to be able to sort through an abundance of information — and do so quickly and easily. Trackers were a big source of traffic and conversions, but analytics showed that readers spent a short amount of time on the page. This suggested readers used trackers to find relevant updates and insights rather than reading everything in full. Making it easy for audiences to sort through an abundance of content would be key to providing reader value.
• On the editorial side, journalists needed a story format that would accommodate variable information. There was a ton of variation in our existing trackers, from text of different lengths to differences in how the entries were ordered to the number of entries. Our journalists needed a format that was resilient and flexible enough to tell stories in a variety of ways.

Designing for reader engagement

With these needs in mind, I began designing the reader-facing article format. I started by examining similar article formats from other publishers to identify UX patterns to explore in our own work, then facilitating critiques of my designs with the rest of the product design team.

To make it easy for readers to sort through what was sometimes an overwhelming amount of content, we made filtering a cornerstone of the experience with sticky filters and clickable filter labels for each entry. We opted for a breezy, light design with truncated entries to make it easier for readers to skim the tracker.

To make the story format flexible and resilient for our journalists to tell a variety of stories, we gave journalists a way to include subheads and images and added a share link for each entry.

We had also noticed in our discovery work that the order of tracker entries fell into two main buckets: some trackers were more date-driven, where the story's news value came from timeliness and the tracker was ordered by most to least recent developments. Other trackers were organized alphabetically to aid users in finding specific entry titles. We designed a format for both.

Designing a profile template

Shortly after our initial work, we also designed a “profile” template that leveraged the infrastructure we had built with our standard trackers, but highlighted profiles of individuals rather than news updates.

The new profile template had a similar foundation to our standard trackers, since they both organized a large group of information, so we adapted our original tracker designs to highlight a person’s name, title, image and bio.

To accommodate this new template in the CMS, we tackled challenges like adjusting our existing tool and maintaining data between the two templates.

We took things a step further for our annual PharmaVoice 100 award list, which we wanted to give an "exclusive" feel to represent the distinction of the awards. To do this, I surfaced lightweight design changes we could make using custom code to elevate the article. See that project here.

Results

Increased audience engagement & growth

In the first eight months after Trackers were integrated into the CMS, 22 trackers were published. In comparison, only 30 trackers had been created in the seven years prior.

These trackers were consistently in the top 10% of articles driving newsletter subscriptions in the months they were published, and readers spent an average of 6.5 minutes on the page.

Increased newsroom efficiency

“In terms of hours saved, I’d say several dozen hours at the low end to possibly a few hundred hours on the higher end ... Our team has been able to do much more journalistic and value-add work at every stage of the projects we were able to take on because we spent so much less time helping with re-implementing existing tracker templates or creating new, slightly different tracker formats. Not to mention all the additional projects we were able to take on with the extra time.” – Data and Graphics Director

View the trackers

• Tracking notable recycling laws by state (standard tracker)
• A running list of states and localities that require employers to disclose pay or pay ranges (standard template)
• Construction Champions 2023 (profile template)