Global LINE News
Global LINE News (aka LINE TODAY) is one of the most popular news content platforms and curation services in Taiwan and aims to deliver valuable content that enrich your everyday life.
If LINE TODAY is a character, her personality that we’re trying to convey is smarter, faster, and personalized. I led the product design from July 2018 to May 2019, then continuely work with couple of talented UX and visual designers to carry out refactoring and the final 2.0 revamp.
Period: July 2018 - December 2019
Role: UX Design Lead
I led the design of UI refactoring from the original version to V1.99, and upgrade to V2.0 from 2018 to 2020, and collaborated with two to three designers on design guidelines, news categories and modules across the whole site on web and LINE App. I stopped working on the project during the detailed visual design phase as the app started to be built.Challenge: UI refactoring and UX revamp strategy
Solution: A consistent design guideline has been created for fast growing development from zero to one, in order to eliminate technical and design debt for years. Meanwhile by establishing easy to use design modules, we can be able to effectively stack up the reading structure that speaks to the content and the users’ needs in flexible and friendly manner.
First comes first. Let’s zoom out little bit from 10,000 feet high to examine the story.
Come to stagnant
LINE TODAY actually occupies a pretty good spot inside the LINE App, where the entry is at the number four tab of the global navigation bar, and the service is available in Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, and Hong Kong during 2018. Some of the LINE users visit LINE TODAY everyday, while some barely visit it.
From 2018 to the middle of 2019, our CTR has been going flat, which results in only 7.2% growth rate, and our Page view, Unique users, and CTR are all coming to stagnant.
learn from the teams & users
The global team starts to feel that there might be something we were missing. We gather all global stakeholders together, and have a two-day workshop, to fully exchange each other’s opinions about the challenge, target audience needs, and product visions in common.
Meanwhile before we invite global stakeholders, we conduct an in depth user interview before hand, and collect all information of what motivates users to stop by a news, how they feel like our brand, and what they got out of our product.
One of the conclusions that all four markets is showing is that people visit Facebook and Youtube very often, but how could we pull out that secret sauce to make our users visit LINE TODAY everyday in LINE, is really a big challenge, since our product attributes are totally different from others.
ideation align
Based on our design concepts that we align with our stakeholders’ expectation and users’ needs, we finally narrow down several key strategies from our findings/brainstorming ideas, which are realized into different chunks of new design and features across the site, such as new homepage with new design language, making news much easier to digest by grouping and being highlighted into different kinds of colors, and providing lifestyle utilities that fulfill local people’s needs while reading news.
For example, from our research showing that 37% of our readers are expecting continuing coverage of some news topic, instead of merely browsing all the way down to the bottom.
In here I take three key features as examples to elaborate how we deal with the new design: which are Utility, News topic, and the Following functionality.
Enhancing users’ engagement is listed on the top of priorities of making business impact. Since one of the major LINE TODAY’s business models comes from the advertisement being sold across the whole site. Therefore the product metrics have to be clearly defined and tracked, so that we can be able to know what success looks like, and figure out the healthness of reading experience.
For example, page view, unique user, and CTR are some of the most important metrics we should keep an eye on it; and of course, if users don’t like our product, they won’t come back again, so these metrics should also speak to the UX goal as well.
Content structure & design system test
People have many choices to choose from and stick with among dozens of news platforms out there. If we want to stand out from other players, the news content has to be treated by an easily-digested order, where people will keep scrolling and easily find the materials of interest. We take out unnecessary element and re-prioritize the content structure that could give users a quick and clear idea of what news we provide for them, and allow them to decide what news they want to read more or follow up.
Similarly like what we run the design test for LINE Shopping, in here we walk through the similar process for LINE TODAY, to step by step fully discuss our UX decision with stakeholders and the team.
While we are in the middle of reframing the product from the vision to design language, the other ongoing track of the task has been coping with UI refactoring, which make us tightly work with front-end engineers to define LINE TODAY’s design system together.
Design System is especially important for LINE TODAY, where the users of the four major areas have different behaviors and needs. Firstly we need to test different languages used and displayed for the news title and body, such as font, size, and line height. Secondly we create the design system which is divided into basic styles, components, elements, modules, and pages, etc. So that the editors can flexibly adjust the layout and module order to fulfill the operation needs as well as the target audience’s needs. We aim for making our news content structure customized for different group of people and different business goals in our main markets and areas.
The original version of LINE TODAY even doesn’t have any design system or styleguide to follow. We got 87 different colors and 44 text styles with tons of sizes without clear definition, even more messy with spacing, images, buttons and patterns. After thinking through and cleaning up the whole site with my excellent design teammates, we converge all styles into less than 15 colors and 16 text styles, along with other elements and modules like forms, modals, badges and tabs, and a lot more.
Proudly introducing TODAY 2.0
After working thru many design tests with stakeholders and my fellow teammates, we come to the point of softly launching our global TODAY 2.0, in our four global areas. In this great launch, we do it very carefully.
We try to balance between the whole site visual language, reading experience and business needs, because we don’t want any revenue drop due to the redesign, and also want to make sure the flow and features meet our users expectations.
user feedback & uniqueness
During the gradual launch, we keep talking to our users and get their feedbacks repetitively, which cannot be done without our global team’s support. They help us run user interview on streets locally and also in lab, and even propose several unique ideas that we couldn’t be able to know without their assistance. For example, people in Thailand have a strong connection to religion and fortune telling. They would pick a color for their dress where they believe the color will bring good luck for the work, for example.
Like LINE Shopping, whenever there’s a new design release, we always collect reviews of likes and dislikes, but the way how we always react upon those feedbacks is to keep following and listening to users’ voices out there proactively, which gives us valuable insight to make our next product better.
Pull the trigger
From the perspective of quantitative data, this revamping redesign gives us significant growth in page view significantly: 5.5% PV increase in Taiwan, and 18% PV increase in Thailand. Unique users number also goes up by 8% increase in Taiwan, and 26% increase in Thailand. We finally achieve impressive gains, and in essence validate our design positively and proven to be on the right track.
Lesson learned & the next bigger challenge
What’s next for LINE TODAY? 64% of our users visit LINE TODAY only 6 times per month. If we are considering to scale up, we have to take those light users into serious account. We also have to change our mindsets a little bit from what we got here, to what could make us bigger. We also learn from Japan’s LINE News initiatives and have been drafting and researching several short and long term strategy as our next growth engine.
Some chanllenges ahead:
People don’t scroll
Personalization has lots of room to improve
Advertisement’s position (highly related to the amount of the ads sold)
Page view traffic optimization
News localization
Richful content hub
Our twin product in Japan, which is LINE NEWS, has been facing similar issues ealier than we do, and incoporated what works and what fails to the initiative ideas. Based on the experiements implemented on those design tests, the strategies that would be highly potential to solve those challenges and issues would be the scalibility of news curation strucutre for the first screen above the fold, and strengthen the data leverage for recommendation system. Meanwhile we could embed the relevant modules under each news page to engage users with curiosity to explore more. , which is kind of similar to the concept of vote or fun quiz in LINE TODAY that attempts to stay on-site longer.
Another great example is that LINE NEWS launches Region tab, which delivers more information about the area closely related to the living area. According to the press, regional information will be more diversed but specific linked to people’s lives, such as station, rather than too broad area like city or town.
As a news aggregator, LINE TODAY also plays a pivotal role of LINE family services central hub. When people read, they also watch, listen and buy. Therefore to picture what LINE TODAY will be empowered, there are many possibilities either benefit users or business impact, beyond fortune widget, election module or live event.
LINE TODAY covers more and more content type just in order to enrich as much variety as possible to delight users’ content consumption experience. By building social and empathetic connection with people, we could be able to grab another millions of users at heart, and make an impact to the product and the society.