Increase engagement with Articles

Product design
Research

Issuu is a digital publishing platform where magazines, brochures, flyers, catalogues and all sorts of other marketing material are published as pdfs and turned into flipbooks. Over 60% of readers access Issuu content on their mobile devices (75% in the USA). The Article feature allows publishers to quickly extract content from their published pdf's optimised for consumption on mobile devices.


In this project, I worked with other teammates. I gathered data, facilitated workshops, conducted customers interviews based on prototypes and launched several features to make it easier to create and share Articles.

How might we help creators create and share mobile optimised content?

I facilitated a series of workshops, mostly in design sprint style, so that we can, together, gain a shared understanding of the overall problem space and opportunities.


We chose the areas to focus on, based on behavioural data, input from customer success and research, and ideated on potential solutions, tested them and implemented in the end with great results :

  • 1.6 x increase in number of publishers using Articles,

  • 1.6 x increase in Articles published,

  • 3.5 x increase in reads (as a consequence of increased sharing)


Process


Discovery & Problem framing

User survey and interviews, Problem space,

Data & flows: As-is state


Ideation & Prototyping

Design sprint, user tests


Design & Implementation

A/ B Tests and iterations


Problem space and identifying opportunities


By making the creation and sharing of Articles a faster, more intuitive process and promoting better the value of this feature, we were looking to increase Article creation, sharing and ultimately the number of reads. This would result in multiplying our content pool, growing traffic and serving our mobile audience better.


We had to take a good look at all the parts that constitute the Article feature experience :

  • from the creator's perspective : this included the publishing flow, editor tool and ability to automatically detect articles

  • from the reader's perspective : we looked at the reading and discovery experience for Articles.


Problem space and identifying opportunities


By making the creation and sharing of Articles a faster, more intuitive process and promoting better the value of this feature, we were looking to increase Article creation, sharing and ultimately the number of reads. This would result in multiplying our content pool, growing traffic and serving our mobile audience better.


We had to take a good look at all the parts that constitute the Article feature experience :

  • from the creator's perspective : this included the publishing flow, editor tool and ability to automatically detect articles

  • from the reader's perspective : we looked at the reading and discovery experience for Articles.


Problem space and identifying opportunities


By making the creation and sharing of Articles a faster, more intuitive process and promoting better the value of this feature, we were looking to increase Article creation, sharing and ultimately the number of reads. This would result in multiplying our content pool, growing traffic and serving our mobile audience better.


We had to take a good look at all the parts that constitute the Article feature experience :

  • from the creator's perspective : this included the publishing flow, editor tool and ability to automatically detect articles

  • from the reader's perspective : we looked at the reading and discovery experience for Articles.



We also had gathered user feedback from interviews, user research and customer success feedback. After conducting the analysis, we identified opportunities for improvement and ultimately narrowed down the A/ B tests and solutions we are going to build in a design sprint workshop.


" It is confusing that I can read Articles on my Mobile but when I click on my Article on my laptop I am redirected to the Flipbook "

Sonja B. , Real estate agent



We also had gathered user feedback from interviews, user research and customer success feedback. After conducting the analysis, we identified opportunities for improvement and ultimately narrowed down the A/ B tests and solutions we are going to build in a design sprint workshop.


" It is confusing that I can read Articles on my Mobile but when I click on my Article on my laptop I am redirected to the Flipbook "

Sonja B. , Real estate agent



We also had gathered user feedback from interviews, user research and customer success feedback. After conducting the analysis, we identified opportunities for improvement and ultimately narrowed down the A/ B tests and solutions we are going to build in a design sprint workshop.


" It is confusing that I can read Articles on my Mobile but when I click on my Article on my laptop I am redirected to the Flipbook "

Sonja B. , Real estate agent


Solutions


Our solutions focused on three aspects :


  • Improving the overall UX of creating and sharing Articles by revamping the Sharing page and testing a new flow focused on the Sharing aspect

  • Providing a stronger value proposition to Creators about the Articles feature through IPM and the ability to view Articles on desktop as well

  • Responding to customer feedback by enabling the ability to reposition the Cover image of the Article inside the editor


User Flow change A/B test

Improving the “Share” page UX

New feature to showcase the Article view on Desktop and mobile

Introduction of new IPM

Introduction of Articles on Desktop

Ability to reposition the Cover image

Outcome


The initiatives combined had a great impact:

  • 1.6 x increase in number of publishers using Articles,

  • 1.6 x increase in Articles published,

  • 4 x increase in article reads


We also received tons of positive customer feedback on the Desktop articles feature launch.


"It’s a much more pleasant reading experience now that the Articles are available on Desktop, it’s absolutely brilliant and we really love that, it’s made all the difference." 

Christopher Gull, Magazine Editor