Alex Hewitt
/
ux designer
UX optimisation in gaming news media.
Gfinity Digital Media Group (GDM) wants to establish themselves as a bigger player in the gaming media space. Their sites pull impressive monthly page views, but more needs to be done to grow, engage and retain their audience.
Entire product design from research to conceptualisation and visualisation.
Approximately 16 weeks, with ongoing iterations and revisions.
The visual design and general UX of GDM platforms is seen as a hinderance to growth. The ad experience, lack of industry-standard features and outdated stylings make simple tasks difficult, especially for mobile users (60-70% of traffic).
Providing relevant news in a highly usable way; GDM platforms should create an engaging, digestible and pleasing experience by accommodating common user behaviours and leveraging industry best-practices.
GDM manifold sites all share a base design, and as such, the same features and issues. While they pull notable traffic, there’s not enough of a lasting impact. Not many features are present that promote organic dwell or make it easy for users to get needed information effectively.
Seemingly no clear strategy with nav item prioritisation, cluttered dropdown and too many actions that subvert user expectations.
Inconsistent breadcrumbs, lack of article tags and poor page layouts heavily detract from experience.
Sub-par search, basic data tables, text-heavy graphical components and obnoxious ad-serving stacks poorly against competitors.
Based on session recordings and analytics, a number of key user behaviours and insights were identified using the largest GDM platform, gfinityesports.com, as the basis.
Mobile the primary experience for users
Highlights the context of use for sites
Is the mobile experience optimised?
Majority of sessions only 1 page deep
Users tend to find guides, skim, then leave
Users not engaging with other content
High headline abandonment on mobile.
Mobile ad experience obnoxious and intrusive
Mobile abandonment 6x that of desktop
Metric might be misleading
Most sessions driven by guides content
9/12 most popular pages in a month are guides
Game code guides see 28% of monthly traffic
Contextualises user reading behaviour
I love silly gacha games so I want quick and easy info to keep my flow
29 y/o
|
Psychology Graduate
Time-conscious
Loyal
Thoughtful
Concise, digestible info
Well organised content
Up-to-date info
Robust search feature
Guides aren’t easy to parse
Info isn't always updated
Mobile ads are in the way
Nav not always helpful
I have limited time to catch up on news, show me what’s interesting
25 y/o
|
School Teacher
Casual
Communal
Patient
Informed
Stay up-to-date on interests
Get notified of new content
Helpful search results
Quick and simple reads
Crowded layouts
Unreliable search feature
No benefits to registration
Sub-par reading experience
I like when my news provider understands how I like to get news
21 y/o
|
Graphic Designer
Well-read
Hard-working
Curious
Staying in the know
Expand gaming library
An engaging platform
News exclusives
Unhelpful architecture
Unusual navigation
Not enough related content while reading
Weak visual design
Strategically, a number of factors needed to be considered when reviewing research data and determining the path forward. Nice visuals and fancy features may only be superficial fixes to deeper issues.
What part does writing play in issues? Are articles bloated? Should titling be looked at?
How best can analytics be contextualised to mitigate misrepresentation?
What are the constraints to ad serving; how would reduced mobile ads impact revenue?
Is SEO ranking cause for limited growth or does UX negatively affect ranking?
Being thorough was key for analysing such a highly competitive space. Both gaming media and other news media platforms were included to paint a clear picture.
Features especially readable article formatting, strong architecture, clean navigation, predictable layouts and engaging features.
Perfect example of content-specific formatting, deep immersive guides content and overall very strong and lasting experience.
Simple, clear layouts with distinct content separation, strong architecture and a fairly unencumbered reading experience.
Exceptional architecture and content tagging, strong formatting and visual hierarchy, and appropriate use of behavioural features.
Simple but strong visual design, exceptional formatting and tagging, strong architecture and overall effective content strategy.
Clean, succinct reading experience with minimal intrusions, elegant visual design and strong content formatting.
Strong, effective layout structure and formatting, clean simple visuals, and highly visible architecture.
Phenomenal visual design, notably unique content formatting, interesting content strategy and strong architecture.
Given the multi-faceted nature of issues faced, we narrowed our problem scoping to address matters of retention, engagement, ads, promotion, layout and organisation.
Keep users engaged while reading (poll, quiz, comments, reactions)
Content formatting for user behaviours - make guides easy to skim and high in value
Cross-platform self-advertising; promote in-network content where appropriate.
Quality over quantity - less ads overall, prioritise higher impact ad units
Make better use of breadcrumbs and article tagging (topics mentioned)
Improve visual hierarchy to create better separation in content areas
Creating a comprehensive experience capable of competing with industry giants was paramount. Given the amount of competition in this space we need a cohesive and consistent design language that builds trust, and in turn, our reputation.
The aim was to leverage best-practices to create a lasting experience. Enhanced UI elements, deliberate layouts and intuitive architecture all combine to produce a highly modular interface that lends itself beautifully to existing and prospective GDM platforms.
Users are after succinct, relevant info and their time should be valued. If users are already scanning and skimming, give them a curated experience that gives reason to return. Additionally, give users features and experiences they are familiar with, and take care to organically encourage engagement.
Take advantage of any and every opportunity to drive traffic among the different network sites. It only makes sense to try and keep as many eyes as possible in-house given the wide variety of content covered by the editorial teams.
Unfortunately, some misinformed decisions had influenced designs which made it to implementation. At the time, we believed these to be correct, but later realised we had unintentionally negated some key strategies.
Sidebar nav was better but lacked dynamism; header was under-utilised
Breadcrumbs highlighted hierarchy, but should have prioritised content topics
Avg. scroll depth is 28%, but some layouts weren’t accounting for this fact
Categorised spaces were definitely improved but still not at the required standard
Having recovered from our blunders, a number of key designs and features are in the pipeline to be implemented.
A restructured navigation experience, additional content refinement options and the ability to key-in on strategic offerings creates a much more optimised and reactive platform.
The premise is simply making it easy to get things done. Give users assistance in finding and making sense of the data they’re after while adding value along the way.
Doing what we know works and providing a familiar experience for users keeps the experience light. Simple triggers and calls-to-action should help make engagement thoughtless.
As features are slowly phased in, we can see steady improvements in our engagement and retention metrics. Implemented features have yielded desired results to some degree, and where we fall short, we iterate in relation to monitored behaviours.
The news media space can be very volatile, especially in gaming, so as we move forward we take great care to pivot strategy as needed while still striving for the ideal user experience.
We were able to “move fast and break things.” While we lacked proper direction at certain stages, we were able to gracefully recover from errors and deliver real solutions.
Being unfamiliar with particular strategies that dictate certain decisions, we made missteps in pursuit of what we thought were ideal solutions. At times we focused more on a particular outcome instead of on solutions that could contribute to the specific goals.
Better to ask obvious questions than make bad guesses. While we consulted key personnel to get clear answers, we may have neglected being internally thorough in terms of strategy.
It’s important to step back from the process to assess if concepts work to achieve goals, or if the team is working to realise ideals.
As designers, it’s easy to get caught up in highly idealistic solutions; keep designs grounded in real data and real constraints to avoid unnecessary rework.
