Client / Crosscut
Roles / User experience design, visual design, user testing
Timeframe / April–May 2019
Crosscut is an online nonprofit news organization reporting on politics, equity and the environment in the Pacific Northwest. Other news organizations would occasionally reach out for permission to republish Crosscut’s articles. This was something editorial leadership wanted to actively encourage and promote in order to raise Crosscut’s profile and standing in the journalism community and expose new readers to their stories.
Problem
The option to republish stories wasn’t mentioned prominently on the site, and the process for requesting permission involved emailing staff directly and working out usage rights on a per-article basis. There was also no way to keep track of where Crosscut stories were used online. Even among other publications that offered republishing, there didn’t exist a feature that did what we were looking for, so it would have to be designed from scratch.
High Country News had a form on their website to request permission to republish a story.
The Texas Tribune provided guidelines for republishing their stories, but had no way to track republished stories unless the publication decided to share it with them.
Who were we designing for?
The intended users were editors and journalists of other publications who were searching for stories to republish.
My role
I was the sole UX designer working on the project, in collaboration with a product manager, editorial staff, and developers. I designed mid-fidelity prototypes, planned and moderated testing, and revised prototypes into high-fidelity designs based on user feedback. Final design deliverables were handed off to developers using Sketch prototypes uploaded to Invision.
Process
Based on the initial feature request, I created an interactive prototype and a testing plan to assess whether it would meet our needs. Several editors and journalists in our organization had experience requesting republishing permission or fielding requests from other sources, so I tested the prototype with five newsroom staff. I gained the following insights and used them to iterate on the design:
The republish feature was discoverable on the article page.
It was clear from the republish modal what the next step was, but not all of the terms and conditions were clear or accurate. The copy would need to be revised and reviewed by our editorial and legal teams.
The story assets provided on the article republish page were useful, but the first version of the design confused some users as far as how to access them, as well as the terminology about the tracking pixel.
Users were impressed with the republish collection page, and gave some feedback on what specific metadata they would find useful when looking for a story to republish
Solutions
Streamlined republishing process
Where before, interested parties would have to send several emails, the new design reduced getting permission and obtaining assets to a 3-step process.
Clarified permissions
Terms and conditions were explained in plain language, and articles with ineligible images were clearly flagged. Contact information was also provided for anyone interested in using Crosscut’s work in other ways.
Improved tracking
Automatically included a tracking pixel in the HTML that was available for download so that there would be a way to keep track of where Crosscut’s articles were being used across the web.
Collection of stories available for republishing
In addition to making it easier for users to republish a single article on the site, the new design created a hub where all eligible stories could be browsed, filtered and sorted, and the most relevant metadata was surfaced at the top level.
Outcome
In the year following the launch of the republish feature, 160 stories were republished by 15 publications with a total of around 340,000 page views. The top republished story alone received 34,000 page views. Over 1,400 users visited Crosscut.com from republished stories. Crosscut’s republish feature was awarded first place for “Best Digital Initiative/Product Development” in the 2020 Local Media Association Digital Innovation Awards.
Reflection
Unlike many aspects of our website, there were few examples of a republish feature in use on other news organizations' sites that we could take inspiration from. The best examples we had to follow were a web form and an explanatory page. But of course, that’s also what made this such an exciting and fulfilling project!
If I were to do this project again under a less constrained timeline, I would like to have had more than one round of testing with our editorial team users prior to launch. Doing a round of testing with outside journalists and editors might have been informative, but it's possible it wouldn’t have been in our interest to preview the feature to competing publications.