Trending Story Detail Page Redesign

Helping users gain deeper insights on timely stories and top Twitter authors.

Zignal Labs
06/2020 – 09/2020

What is Zignal Labs?

Zignal Labs is the world’s leading impact intelligence company, helping users measure opinion in real time and identify the topics, networks and people that shape it. Used by the world’s largest companies and public sector organizations, Zignal lets users measure and shape their corporate brand, drive improved marketing performance, understand impactful product features, and identify risks and opportunities as they emerge.

Who uses Zignal Labs?

Understanding the conversation

Zignal users can be quite varied but all center around understanding the conversation around a particular topic or brand. Our users come from the communication, public relations, marketing, brand management, and crisis management spaces, each with very specific needs and goals.

For example, Zignal users may be responsible for tracking and monitoring negative stories about their company during a crisis event and preventing those stories from getting out of control. Other users may be responsible for compiling reports on sentiment and total mentions and understanding the changes in these metrics over time. Other users may want to understand their share of voice compared to their competitors and explore options to increase their share.

The problem

Our problem begins with Pendo (data analytics tool) which we had recently implemented at Zignal Labs. We wanted to use Pendo to track the engagement of Zignal Labs’ extensive library of widgets. One of the widgets we thought was being used to accomplish many of our users’ goals was the Trending Stories Detail Page. However using Pendo data, we noticed many users were adding the widget to their brand monitoring dashboards but a very low percentage of users were clicking into the Trending Story Detail Page.

The Trending Stories widget tracks the shares of a link on Twitter. Users can see the number of shares/mentions and then open the Trending Story Detail Page for more in-depth information.

So…what is this feature used for?

Great question! This feature was designed to help users quickly discover stories gaining traction, mainly on Twitter, and then surface who was sharing or driving the velocity of the story. For our users, this can be incredibly helpful around crisis events or general brand monitoring to understand the larger conversation.

Why is no one using it?

We decided to figure out why no one was clicking into a fairly important widget (from our perspective at least). One of the main challenges was finding users to talk to who were using the feature. Most external users we spoke with did not know the point of the Trending Story Detail Page. Their experience had been clicking on the external icon in the Trending Stories widget and then not understanding what they were seeing. After that, users never clicked on it again because they assumed the Trending Story Detail Page was just the article and nothing else.

We finally realized we should be speaking with internal users who were frequently interacting with the page. We used Pendo to track internal power users of the page. These internal users were advanced data analysts helping our clients uncover insights around trending stories. We asked them how they were using the page.

Advanced analyst workflow

As we interviewed these internal power users, we realized they had created their own incredibly advanced workflow to extract insights from the Trending Story Detail Page, a workflow average users could not do on their own. Their multi-step process started with:

- Exporting list of Tweets from the detail page out to excel
- Sorting and looking for highest retweeted Twitter user
- Plugging Twitter handle into Discover and Influence Intelligence
- Analyzing Twitter user further (automated? credible?)
- Adding Twitter user to Top Authors widget
- Further monitoring the Twitter author
- Searching story in the Newsroom

So why were they doing this?

Identify top authors

The reason our advanced users were doing this was to identify top authors around a trending story. Who is sharing and talking about this article the most? Do they have many followers? Are they authentic or automated? They could then add these authors to different widgets to keep track and monitor them further.

Story timeline

Our advanced users also wanted to learn about the story timeline. Did this story coincide with a special event? Did it begin trending when the article was written or did it trend later after a certain event? Was there a spike in sharing? The current design made this very difficult and our advanced users would have to dig through the Newsroom (raw data page) to find these connections.

New communities

Lastly, they wanted to learn about the communities these top authors were connected to. How can our customers gain access to these communities? Are there other important authors in these communities we don’t know about?

The opportunity

With all this research done, we finally realized the opportunity for this project. Without doing all this necessary research in the beginning, we would have gotten off on the wrong foot.

Opportunity

Rethink the trending story feature to help users quickly discover key points around a trending story.

User goals

Quickly gather important metrics about trending stories and find important Twitter authors to monitor or interact with.

Business goals

Increase user engagement throughout the platform and decrease time to value for users. Upsell our two new Twitter focused features, Discover and Influence Intelligence.

The solution

For our solution, we created a central location for our users to investigate a trending story and identify important Twitter authors

Overview tab

We designed a central location to learn about a trending story where users could see a quick overview of the contents and then navigate to the original website if needed. Users could quickly see the first sharer of a story and either add this user to a widget for further monitoring or input this into Discover or Influence Intelligence. They could see the complete story timeline and interact with the chart where it would bring the user to the Newsroom.

Tweets tab

On the Tweets tab, users could quickly sort by retweet count to identify Twitter authors with the most retweets, an important metric in figuring out how important a Twitter author was. The user could view the tweet on Twitter, add the user to a widget, or sort the tweets by date.

Team & timeline

Design

I was the Lead Product Designer for this project and my responsibilities included:

- User research
- Low fidelity designs
- Usability testing
- High fidelity designs

Engineering

Engineering Lead
2 Platform Engineers
1 Frontend Engineer

Product

Senior Product Manager

Timeline

June 2020 - September 2020