User Profile

Overview

Several teams at the New York Times saw benefit in creating a more personalized product experience. Product leadership saw value in a “user profile” to house identity attributes that could be used to enhance many aspects of the NYT experience. In order for these teams to begin exploring this space, an initial set of profile attributes needed to be created and launched to allow users to begin engaging with them. Product leadership determined they would be interested in name, username, and location data as an MVP for a user profile.

My role:

Senior Product Designer - primary design contributor

Design process

Problem

Create a way for users to understand, input, and manage name, username, and location in their New York Times account.

Planning

Profile workshop

Goal:

Designers from several stakeholder teams got together to align on a vision for how profile attributes could add user value and how they could be collected and managed.

Key Takeaway: Following the workshop, participants aligned around introducing basic management functionality in a user’s account while collecting attribute information across the product experience would be considered out of scope.

Additionally, the team aligned around presenting users with clear information about how data would be used and why it is being collected.

COMPETITIVE analysis

Goal:

Evaluate how similar, subscription based services allow users to manage an identity.

Key Takeaways: I determined that users may expect their account to house profile information, and that most products typically require users to click into dedicated pages to edit content.

identifying user needs

Identify actions a user needs to take in order to create/manage a profile and what user’s needs are at each step to effectively plan design needs.

Information architecture review

Goal

Evaluate how new functionality could be implemented into the existing information architecture of the New York Times Account.

design concepts

first concepts

The first round of explorations focused on how inputing or changing profile data should work.

Due to design system and technical constraints, it was determined that separate pages for editing was more feasible and in line with existing patterns than in line editing.

second round concepts

The second round of explorations focused on how to incorporate profile attributes into the information architecture of account.

After reviewing explorations, the team decided to move forward with usability testing to better understand how users would interact with these attributes.

evaluating design approaches

unmoderated user testing

In collaboration with research patterns, we decided to launch an unmoderated usability test to quickly evaluate the effectiveness of different approaches to organizing profile information in the New York Times account.

Methods:

Users were presented with each prototype and asked to evaluate:

• Clarity of the account menu

• User friendliness of finding profile information

• User friendliness of adding profile attributes
  
  Additionally an overall SUS score was calculated for each variant

Key Takeaways:

Users reported Version A (maintaining our current IA) had the clearest menu

Version A had slightly higher usability rankings for each task and SUS scores

These scores seemed to primary be driven by version A having less complexity as tasks were on the first page encountered.

SUS Scores:

Design Handoff

Information architecture design decision

Based on the usability study, the team decided to move forward with “Version A” in which a new “Profile” section would be added to the existing “Account Home” page (option A).

error handling

As the team launched this product, an important design factor became properly handling potential error and edge cases due to the nature of collecting and maintaining user generated content.

The team worked with partners to define criteria for valid inputs and create user friendly error handling.

evalutating success

success metrics

The Subscriber Revenue team determined that adoption of profile attributes would not be factored as a success metric because the work focused on creating the MVP functionality and usability rather than pushing users to enter the information.

Instead, success will be determined by the ease at which users are able to enter and maintain this information by evaluating usability testing results and observing error rates on profile pages.

building a profile platform

A primary goal of this work was to build out basic profile functionality that can serve as a platform for other teams at The Times to build features that utilize profile attributes to drive engagement and reduce churn.

design refinement

Cross Mission Collaboration - Primary Locations

The profile project was initially scoped to include Name, Username, and a Location attribute. However, product leadership decided to redefine the location attribute as “Saved places” which would allow a user to input locations they were interested in seeing personalized content about (i.e. weather, news updates, sports coverage, etc.)

This increased the scope of work to include allowing users to add or manage multiple locations.

Collaboration Model:

The Subscriber Experience team would take ownership of the design work with the Subscriber Revenue team providing design feedback and handling the design handoff and engineering implementation.

This allowed the Subscriber Experience team to have a large degree of design input as the primary stakeholder for the location data while also utilizing the implementation expertise of the Subscriber Revenue team as the owners of the Account platform.

Process:

The Subscriber Experience team provided several mockups with the Subscriber Revenue team providing technical feedback.

My role was to finalize the designs to handoff an MVP that addressed technical feedback

Design decisions

• Saving content upon selection/remove rather than at page level

• UI consistency with design system

• Error states

next steps

Following the launch of the MVP of the User Profile, several teams at the New York Times have begun evaluating how to utilize these attributes for engagement purposes and increase the number of users who provide the information. The MVP serves as a successful platform that other teams can use to build new features on top of.