It’s sometimes easy to forget that treating the user experience as an art and science as it is practised now is a relatively recent addition in the journalism industry. 

The Atlantic, an American magazine and multi-platform publisher, aims to build on human-centred journalism and how it gains and uses insights to create powerful experiences for its consumers. 

The publishing company, whose majority owner is Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Apple’s Steve Jobs, has spent two years studying non-readers, subscribers, podcast listeners, and people in other audiences of interest to identify addressable concerns.

Goligoski joined WAN-IFRA’s recent virtual Newsroom Summit to give a primer on the brand’s business and editorial strategy as it relates to user experience.

Why bother with qualitative research?

The Atlantic does so to demonstrate its value and how it stands apart from its contemporaries. The current journalism marketplace is extremely crowded with every news organisation in competition for users’ time and limited spending potential – arguably, their most precious resources. 

The Atlantic newsroom is driven by a combination of editorial instinct, business acumen and reader insights, combined with data science to make informed decisions to help the brand grow. 

“Being able to demonstrate how we create our work and seeking feedback throughout the design process is critical because our readers are not us. So, we need to go out and learn about them,” Goligoski said. “Making sure we are checking our assumptions, and soliciting feedback can be really generative.” 

Separating signal from noise 

Goligoski’s team consists of her and another full-time researcher on the qualitative side of the company, and works in close conjunction with a data science team of about five people. The research team helps balance the ratio of signal to noise through:

• • Interviews: Great for specific recruiting, when you want to understand an audience segment deeply. It’s a good chance to get into nuance, understand points of concern, and willingness to pay. 
  • Surveys: Good for collecting thoughts from widely geographically distributed groups, while being respectful of users’ time limits. The team tries to keep its surveys under four minutes and makes them such that they are compatible with phones.
  • Concept and usability testing: A good way to gather reactions to visual designs and interactions in progress.
  • Competitive and analogous research
  • Training teams to self-serve
  • Diary studies: This is a great way to observe pattern usage over a window of time, for instance a week or a month. In this process, a chunk of The Atlantic users act like an advanced listening team and are presented with content to analyse before it is released online. This helps Goligoski gauge their thoughts and improve the brand’s content offering. This technique works particularly well for podcasts, and the participating users are compensated for their time and effort.
  • Conversation facilitation, stakeholder research and design research exercises.  

Information gathering across apps, crossword, podcasts, and articles has helped the research team generate a robust, rigorous set of audience member needs, which are:

• Demand for deeper clarity and context
• Help them in discovering new ideas
• Challenging their assumptions
• Offering them meaningful breaks
• Introducing them to writers at the top of their craft

What are your audiences’ needs?

This will vary for different companies and their various audiences, depending on what the user is coming to them for – to catch up on current affairs, breaking news, or deeply understand an issue. For most of those things, there either are qualitative approaches or quantitative ways to be able to look for answers to those questions, according to Goligoski. 

Here are a few ideas the company is exploring: 

• Expansion: The Atlantic has historically been a domestic US publication. The magazine is now looking for geographies to expand to where it is best poised to grow. “When we take these questions both internally and externally, we hear that the brand is strongest when it is straightforward and has an edge to set itself apart from what its peerset is offering,” said Goligoski of their research.
• Meeting user expectations: It’s important to ask the audience where a brand failed to meet their expectations to gain insight on cancelled or non-subscribing users. This could be because of multiple reasons. For instance, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the audience’s relationship with leisure and in-office time changed, and commuting time was eliminated; in several cases, their employment status also changed. 

A calming user experience

Goligoski cited her previous experience of working with The Membership Puzzle Project, a public research project, where her team studied 500 news organisations to understand the value exchange between what an individual gives and what they get, when supporting independent journalism. 

Now, she is following the same path at The Atlantic, almost like a guide to the rules of engagement or points of differentiation for news organisations that are well worth their consumers’ time and money.

So what sets these news companies apart? Goligoski elaborated on a few pointers:

• A sense of uniqueness: This is a call to pause and reflect. Goligoski’s team listened to complaints about news sites that pile on to the same stories with sound bites and distracting ads, and took that as a call for uniqueness. This proved helpful to The Atlantic in standing out from its peers, and offering a good user experience and coverage that readers couldn’t find elsewhere.
• Transparency: After interviewing people at various news organisations, the research team realised that even-long time supporters had trouble naming more than one person behind The Atlantic’s website. 

“That suggested that we could make our staff more visible where it’s safe to do so, and ourselves less institutional. We all work to make ourselves more human and approachable,” said Goligoski. “In a world where our organisations are still being called fake news, being authentic and transparent is a powerful way to inculcate ourselves.” 

“Some of these strategies won’t work in instances where independent media is under sustained assault,” she continued. “And we might still think about how we’re well served to grow by clearly describing our mission and being interested in what our community members need.”

• Brand design and visual appeal: 

Having products with a calm and considerate user experience design stands out. Goligoski thinks of it as letting people do what they came to your site to do – whether that’s paying for your work, understanding other people’s opinions or making sense of a complex breaking news topic.

Research particulars

At any point in time, Goligoski’s team is involved in two streams of research and handling three or four projects. The first is product-based research that covers concept testing, validation and iterative research.

The second stream of research is more business forward looking that involves looking at emerging tech trends, continually refreshing their understanding of what is happening in the journalism industry, and the many ways the company is best poised to grow and reach new audiences. 

The company is also looking at subscriber diversification. “These two streams of parallel research can inform each other in a really generative way,” she said. “It also means that we can’t undertake everything we would potentially want to. Along with our inputs, we want to equip audience editors, product managers, and designers to self-serve their research with the tools at hand.”