Design Strategy for Subscription News: Research & Artifacts That Drive UX Enhancements

CLIENT:
The New York Times

RELATIONSHIP:
In-house Contractor

PROJECT DURATION:
2 Weeks

TEAM:
2 members of of Subscription Optimization teams, 1 Creative Leads, Director of UX Research, User Experience Researcher (myself)

RESPONSIBILITIES:
I conducted unmoderated evaluative studies to illuminate UX issues, compiled relevant competitor examples, and shared my own concept design

OBJECTIVE:
Gather data to illustrate how users move through comparative subscription flows, make sense of observed drop-off in A/B test metrics, and recommend improvements

RESULTING IMPACT:
My design recommendations were quickly applied to the Home Delivery subscription flow, and extended to digital-only subscriptions as well. Follow-up revealed overall conversion rate was better sustained through the social sign-up screen, and the resources were reallocated to new business problems.

BUSINESS PROBLEM

After implementing the social sign-up API, creative teams partnered with the Optimization teams to A/B test an awesome art directed experience (A) against the existing zip-code entry experience (B), and observed a 34% lift, but 20% depression upon reaching social sign-up. How can we explain and solve for this observation?

RESEARCH DESIGN 💡

I designed an unmoderated evaluative study of the landing pages, using custom staging links provided by the Optimization team. An outline of the test experience is shown at left, and we assessed comprehension of information for Home Delivery Subscription offerings at key stages of each flow.

Our original study design assumed that all incoming traffic to the landing pages was coming from within the NYT digital properties, but after stakeholders confirmed the large number of readers coming from directly from Search, I thought it better to expand our scope as follows.

METHODOLOGY DETAILS

Method: Unmoderated evaluative study with (n=20)

Session Duration / Time in-field: 35 minutes / 1 week

Key Screener Criteria:

  • Participants were subscribed to at least one news publication

  • Participants reported an openness to paying for home delivery

ABRIDGED LEARNING GOALS

  • How do we explain the drop-off at social sign-up? How are the expectations set up by the different landing pages being tested?

  • On the whole, do users comprehend daily options for subscirption? Or do they simply think Home Delivery is only available on Sundays?

  • What are the strengths and weaknesses of each page here?

  • The control version of the landing page got praise for simplicity, but some readers noted it was not aligned with the polished experience of NYT, whether in print or digital.

  • The complexity of two pathways (one for Sunday and another to select your days of the week) was a bit overwhelming, and some completely missed the array of daily delivery combinations.

EVALUATIVE LEARNINGS

Our most impactful learnings revealed the universal expectation to pay before creating account, and the need to tidy up Home Delivery Subscription links online to ensure readers arrive to the correct place.

RECOMMENDATIONS 💡

My recommendations were to resolve the broken links appearing on Google search results, and to implement a progress bar to guide readers along the subscription process.

To bolster my report and findings, I took a look at The Washington Post & Wired to see how they approached the subscription experience, and presented these reference points along with a simple solution I put together myself.

Wired’s Subscription Experience

Washington Post Subscription Experience

My design solution for the Subscription Progress Bar