NowThis News
Strategy / Research / Direction / UX / UIBackgroundNowThis built a herculean brand by bringing the news exclusively to social feeds. They pioneered social video with snackable clips that broke complex stories into a highly-digestible platform-specific format that resonated tremendously with their millennial audience. Success followed with boastful stats like 30 million minutes of video watched every single day, 2.5 billion monthly views, and ultimately climbing the ranks to become the #1 most watched news brand across social.
Homepage. Even the word sounds old. We bring the news to your social feed.
Meanwhile, a visit to NowThis’ website would greet readers with that simple, brand-defining, message.
While this brand strategy was monumentally successful at attracting millions of followers & billions of views across social platforms every month, it meant leaving massive opportunities for both the brand & the business on the table.
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— Design & launch an innovative media site that can attract and convert social followers into habitual brand loyalists.
— Unlock fully owned & diversified revenue streams, lessening the reliance on ever changing algorithms and upside down rev-share policies from platforms we have no control over.
— Achieve this with little-to-no changes to existing content strategy & production workflows by leveraging automation & AI wherever possible.
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— While the appetite for a website was there, NowThis remained steadfast in their commitment to a social-only approach to telling the news. We knew to expect little-to-no content or curation specifically for the website, but to rely almost entirely on content created for & distributed across social platforms.
— A run-of-the-mill media site would not only defy the brand’s mission statement, but it would go against the principles of our Product team. An archival hub of social videos is an extremely weak value proposition for our users. A website needs to have a unique & specific purpose for it’s audience in modern digital media.
— Lastly, we needed to align on how success will be measured. Holding this site to the same content performance standards as social platforms is an unrealistic metric to chase. Agreeing to treat this product as it’s own platform with unique best practices and outcomes took a concerted strategic approach from our Product team.
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— Research & Interviews. Excluding NowThis staff, we had a massive pool of candidates to interview by means of employees of other brands under Group Nine’s umbrella. After conducting simple surveys & questionnaires to rule out anyone with potential biases, we dug deep to learn the habits of how folks prefer to discover and engage with the news.
— Ideation & Exploration. I have never enjoyed coming into work more than in the weeks following our research & interview phase. Armed with performance data, consumption habits of our target demo, and an appetite to completely break convention I and my team conducted a series of design sprints each targeting one of 3 core types of content-buckets identified during our research phase: Latest Stories, Episodic Originals, Topics. Additionally, we wanted to create a video-viewing experience that would be just as passive as a social feed, easily flowing from one to the next, with the content under a spotlight.
— Proposals & Approvals. Due to the significance of a famously social-only brand launching a website, there were a number of stakeholder groups ranging from the NowThis editorial staff (who would ultimately be responsible for any production & staffing demands), to Sales, Marketing, and the CRO (who would need to bring this product to market & successfully capture numerous new revenue streams), to the CEO of Group Nine who was actively pursuing more potential acquisitions and mergers. This meant applying the same design-thinking we employed during our research & exploration phases: know your audience. We earned approvals on our concepts, content strategy, and editorial workflow proposals by catering our presentations and demos to the user & addressing head-on any concerns we knew were most likely to arise.
Prototype Password: stories that move
Please read/open the left panel for an overview of how to best use the prototype. Works across devices, but designed for Desktop use.
Highlight_01 Latest Stories
Throughout interviews & competitive research we identified a major white-space that NowThis was uniquely positioned to fill. Most “news sites” often feel completely overwhelming with dense information-overload and numerous competing headlines. A simple breakdown of the latest news didn’t exist, especially one with such efficient means of storytelling.
With a goal of converting social followers into habitual users, we set out to create a place where users know they can visit multiple times a day/week to see the latest news in a format they love. We accomplish this by dedicating the entirety of the homescreen to the most recently published stories with engaging social-inspired means of navigating.
Humble brag: while this launched after Snapchat introduced the concept of “stories”, this user experience was created before Instagram launched the now ubiquitous story-format.
Visitors to the homepage would swipe horizontally to see the latest developing stories in reverse chronological order. The rapid-rate in which NowThis would release content all-but guaranteed that the homepage would be incredibly dynamic.
From a workflow perspective, this was all achieved by creating an additional flag in the NowThis CMS deeming a story appropriate for the Homepage. We included the ability for a custom background video/photo asset to be uploaded, but also employed AI to determine the clearest 3-second clip from the video to automatically generate the asset.
Highlight_02 NowThis Originals Streaming
Beyond the daily churn of content, NowThis operates an Oscar-winning production studio of original content, known as NowThis Originals.
While this long-form content was teased across social, it didn’t have a dedicated home built specifically for episodic content. Even on YouTube, unless you knew to look for it, it was left to passive discovery.
Additionally, the quality of Originals began attracting the attention of our advertising partners who shared similar missions and had aligned themselves with the type of activism that NowThis so regularly promoted.
Highlight_03Topics
Beyond the desire for latest and breaking stories came the user appetite for more thorough coverage of current and recent events. The news is ever-evolving, and while NowThis was diligent at following each story, users were unable to follow along.
Topic pages would be automatically generated based on the primary content tag in the CMS and published if an additional flag was triggered.
The California Wildfire topic on display here shows the most robust offering with custom artwork, editorialized introductory text, an in-page subnav, and link-outs to related content or sub-topics. Each of those elements are entirely optional and we designed fallbacks that would gracefully scale back to a version that would require no additional lift from editorial teams beyond providing the initial flag to publish the page.
Lastly, NowThis was in the early days of investing into an ecosystem of newsletter products. To help initiate that interest we build a Subscribe feature where users input their email and we’d inform them when new content was published.
Negroni Design System →
Strategy / Research / Advocacy / Creative Direction / UX / UIThe proprietary Design System powering the front-end of every brand in Group Nine Media’s growing portfolio. This system maintains a consistent user experience across our products, makes new features available cross-brand with wild efficiency, and drastically reduces redundant coding, qa, and support all without sacrificing brand expression. Most importantly, it freed up my nimble team to focus on new priorities vs reinventing the wheel. Cheers 🥃.
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