Guest Host

MY ROLE: Product Development, Product Manager & Producer

TEAM: ABC Innovation

KEY STAKEHOLDERS: Head of Online & Mobile, Senior Product Manager, ABC Homepage, Audience

PROCESS:

Discovery
Concept generation
First Iteration
Second Iteration
Integration

The Brief

The ABC homepage is the main digital gateway to ABC online. The brief was to ‘inject personality’ into the homepage whilst maintaining it's crisp, clean look and feel.

Key objectives

To showcase the breadth of ABC content.
To liven up the ABC homepage and inject personality.
To create a cross-platform initiative which is transferable to the mobile site and the ABC Australia Facebook, Twitter & Google+ presences.
To develop content workflows that fit in with the current ABC homepage editorial team structure.

Discovery

Discovery research validated the suggestion of adding a face to the homepage. Eye-tracking studies had also shown that users are immediately drawn to human faces on a page, especially when the gaze is front on. Numerous competitors had used a similar approach where an 'author image' is placed in a prominent space, linking directly to a piece of content.

Concept Generation

After sketching out a range of different approaches and consulting with the team, I created a series of mock-ups to show how the Guest Host mechanism and content module would work.

While the initial suggestion had been to feature the Guest Host on the top carousel of the homepage, consultation with the UX Lead highlighted a conflict between this approach and previous homepage research.

As 33% of clicks on the homepage were on the news carousel or through to the news page, this real estate at the top of the page needed to remain news focused. The solution was to insert a clickable image of the Guest Host at the top of the page, above the header which connected via an anchor link to the Guest Host content module further down the page.

First Iteration

I project managed end to end process of design, build, testing and launch. As the producer I was also responsible for securing the talent, helping them to select content and feeding the information through to the editorial team work flows. After completing a pilot series of five hosts and analysing engagement metrics, I drew a number of conclusions:

There was a positive upturn in visits to the featured content.
The clicks on the Guest Host image above the header were higher when we featured a TV personalities. Even though other ABC personalities might have interesting content - the TV faces were easier for users to recognise.
The Guest Hosts with the highest levels of engagement were the ones that were tied to a tent pole event or a current TV program. eg. Dr Karl for Science week.
On social media, engagement peaked after three days of the Guest Hosting (which ran for five), then dropped off for the remainder.

Host image above the header connects via anchor link to content module down the page.

Second Iteration

Based on the learnings from the first iteration, the second iteration had the following changes:

Three day run instead of five across homepage and social media.
Selection of hosts tied to calendar events. We also experimented with a Lunar New Year collaboration with ABC International, where a Year of the Horse graphic was incorporated into the Guest Host template, rather than a human face or personality.
Launch on the mobile optimised homepage to create a consistent experience for the user across multiple devices.

Kumi Taguchi - One of the ABC Ambassadors for Mental Health Week

Integration

Upon completion of the second iteration, the workflows for Guest Host were documented and the production role was handed over to the homepage editorial team.

Guest Host is now part of the ABC homepage team’s editorial toolkit. It was recently used to feature content selected by ABC Mental Health Ambassador’s as part of the ‘Mental As’ initiative for Mental Health week 2014.