Timeframe
Sept. 2023 - June 2024
Team
2 Product Designers and 1 PM
Deliverables
Re-design our current newsletters and launch a new newsletter
Tools
Figma, Campaigner and Page Builder
Context
For the new fiscal year, The Globe’s new strategy for our product team is to foster audience growth and continuous reader engagement from external platforms - extending our reach beyond our core products, and creating diverse touchpoints for our audience in the digital world.
Within my team, I was responsible for redesigning our editorial newsletters and introducing a new newsletter tailored for readers under 35.
Problems The Globe want to improve
Today, inboxes are flooded with newsletters, overwhelming people's time. In the sea of emails, reeling and hooking in time-starved readers was a challenge The Globe was desperate to solve.
As a brand that upholds its news as premium content, many newsletters needed a facelift to differentiate themselves. The Globe was on a mission for newsletters to be concise and memorable, cutting through the clutter to connect with their readers.
Common complaints from readers:
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Dull look and feel
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Text heavy
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Needs better navigation; there are too many variation of topics
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Sometimes content repeats in multiple newsletters
Goals for the fiscal year
We sought to improve the usability of the newsletter, support business priorities, improve brand identity, support sign-up conversions and bring delight to the reading experience.
Success metrics
A steady increase in the number of newsletter sign-ups and paid subscriptions
Increase click-through and open rates
Readers express satisfaction with the newsletter experience and develop a deeper sense of loyalty to The Globe
Readers actively interact with the content, such as clicking on links and forwarding newsletters
Creating a foundation for the first launch
We planned to roll out the newsletters gradually over the fiscal year, targeting higher subscriber volumes first. This approach aimed to garner quicker user feedback, facilitating fast iteration and evolution of the newsletters for subsequent phases.
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Carrick on Money: 67,413 subscribers
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Morning Update: 109,004 subscribers
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Under 35: new and part of the strategy to reach a younger audience
Research phase
The scope of the research was large, so I relied heavily on a research proposal to help structure how we will approach our first study, what we will ask readers and assumptions we want to test.
Research goals
Reader’s newsletter journey
Learn how they comprehend the format
Learn what motivates them to take action
To support our research goals, we conducted user interviews and a usability test with our participants. We delved into their newsletter reading habits and gathered insights about their perceptions of existing newsletters. During the second portion of the interview, participants were prompted to provide feedback on new newsletter concepts, allowing us to gather insights on any observed changes, potential improvements, and comparisons with the current newsletter layout.
Our strategy from our findings
Carrick on Money newsletter
Organize content to make it easier to navigate so that participants find and enjoy more stories that are relevant to them.
Morning Update newletter
Format content so that it’s scannable, digestible and allows readers to clearly intuit the day's top headlines.
To help share our design strategy with our stakeholders, our team organized a meeting to discuss our research findings and proposed concepts. The purpose of the meeting was to ensure that our design direction aligned with their editing and writing workflow. During this session, we aimed to assess the potential impact of changes and for writers to share any important considerations.
Identifying our design limitations
Technical
During our early 30% iteration process, most of our investigation into the technical requirements was on hold since we had not finalized an email marketing platform to host our newsletters.
Our work involved exploring documentation of potential and existing platforms we would potentially use. This would help us know how we should shape the experience of our newsletters and what limitations we were faced with.
By the time we were updated with a platform, not only did we learn that some components needed an update, but our access to a developer to build the newsletters was constrained due to our budget.
As our deadline to launch two newsletters came at head, thankfully for my development background, I created a template in our drag-and-drop tool for two of our newsletters, Carrick on Money and Lately.
After the launch of our first two newsletters, we slowly worked alongside our developers from another team to understand what is possible, if we need to change existing components and how we can best support editorial with their editing process
Juggling strong stakeholder opinions
One of our goals for creating the newsletter experience is to tie it to our email design system. This involves creating a new UI library for all email atomic elements to live. Holistically bridging elements within the website and app platforms with the email system were all things defined.
Some stakeholders had strong opinions concerning our decisions as we explored how we wanted to apply foundational elements.
One challenge was solidifying a hyperlink colour. Our old pattern was a bolded dark grey text. From our exploration, my colleague and I decided to offer a blue line/text-decorated option.
The more we offered why we believed they were the best options through best practices, competitive research or recommendations from the reps from our technical platform, our ideas kept getting declined by stakeholders.
Thanks to our internal resources, created a user survey to help find a solution. We resorted to our research department, Globe Insiders, to put out a quick survey to hear from our newsletter readers and their preferences. Our results showed that people prefer to keep the bolded text. Something no one expected to be the right answer!
Design: Sample concepts
Carrick on Money newsletter
Rob's Reading List
Old section
New section
From our readers (Ask Rob sub-section)
Old sub-section
New sub-section
Stress Test podcast
Old section
New section
More Personal Finance from The Globe
Old section
New section
Morning update newsletter
Top stories
Old layout
New layout
Soft stories
Old layout
New layout
Outcomes so far...
Positive feedback from readers and writers
We’ve heard from readers how the layout of the newsletter is easier to read and they enjoy the overall experience.
Created a foundation for the rest of our newsletters
With the creation of the available sections in the launched newsletters, the goal for editorial staff is to use the sections to help formulate how they want to use in their newsletters
Takeaways
This project was my first big scale to co-lead. When I initially started the project, I knew we had challenges along the way but I didn’t realize how many roadblocks would get in the way. While navigating the project, there were a lot of ups and downs as the scope of the project kept changing. Nonetheless, we still received positive feedback for our first launched newsletter.
There’s still a lot to explore and launch with this project, but a foundation for the newsletters is created and is scalable as we launch the other newsletters.
