Focused User Needs Articles - A Q&A with Dmitry Shishkin

Do user needs actually work? Our long time friend and collaborator, Dmitry Shishkin had the same question. So we decided to answer it together.

Read the Client Case here

This conversation was between Rutger Verhoeven and Dmitry Shishkin. It has been edited for length and clarity.

----------

RUTGER: So, Dmitry, before we answer the question, get us up to speed. What have you been up to?

DMITRY: Well, for the last year and a bit I’ve been leading the non-Swiss media titles that belong to Ringier. The department I’m heading is Ringier Media International and it looks after all the media operations in Central and Eastern Europe predominantly. We have a wide portfolio of titles: traditional media, but also niche titles, women's titles. It’s very varied.

My job is to make them more effective, more engaging, more efficient - and ultimately more sustainable. That’s what everyone wants, really, but this has been an interesting challenge just because of the sheer diversity and range of titles we’re looking after.

You’ve worked for many years now on (and with) user needs, first at the BBC and then as a consultant. What’s it been like applying that experience to Ringier Media International?

Having worked at BBC Worldwide where I’d seen the improvement made after we started embracing user needs, I knew right from the start at Ringier, that we needed to employ the same approach. It was always the same at the BBC: user needs-centric articles always performed better than non-user centric articles.

Now I have access to all the output of those titles at Ringier, I wanted the same answer as you guys at smartocto: if an article is user-needs focused (and it doesn’t really matter which user need it’s focused on) does it perform better than the article which isn’t?

Let me just play devil’s advocate for a moment: why is that a problem?

Yes, that’s an important point. If you have a lot of user needs in the same article, readers may find the lack of clarity frustrating or difficult. It may also be that you have a headline which indicates an article is going to do one thing - but then the article itself actually does something completely different. That’s not brilliant for building trust in a brand - and I think that not having a clear focus is at the root of a lot of reader apathy and news avoidance.

As you say, the fact that readers have needs was the premise that user needs were built on - and it’s up to newsrooms to address those. When they’re focused and targeted, readers will reward them with attention and loyalty -

- so the question we had was: is there evidence for this?!

Exactly. So, in this data study we defined ‘focused’ as an article which scores more than 60% on the user needs playground [smartocto ‘s tool to automatically define articles], and we used 60% as our threshold to remove any ambiguity. Talk to us about the results.

They were unsurprising to us: user needs centric articles perform better than articles which don’t have a pronounced user need at the core.

Surprise, surprise!

Exactly. This is a great shout out to all the work we’ve done: it actually works.

Obviously, it’s great to get this result. But what else is worth mentioning?

Firstly the fact that these results are sound. We’re only sharing data that has been considered by data science people much smarter than me to be statistically important and statistically relevant. And the sample we studied represents a diverse range of titles from different places, with different focuses, different everything. That’s why the results are so gratifying: we’ve shown that it works all over - not just sometimes.

Let’s go back to the survey.What we see in the results is that articles which have a clear user need focus get more readers. Does this surprise you?

Get the full results here

To be clear, it’s not just that article reads are higher, your data scientists tell us the results are statistically significant, right? 34% is not 10% - it’s a lot.

The results don’t surprise me, but I am pleased with them. When you’re writing a story, you’re competing against lots of other media organisations, who are covering the same story, and chances are that the headline you all come up with for that story will be very, very similar.

If you purposefully decide that your way into an article will be a little bit different, and you’re clearly signalling the user need that you’re going to cover the story with, your headline will stand out. And, if it stands out, people are likely to notice it more.

Looking at reader experience, we studied page depth. There’s a 9% increase there with user needs-focused articles. Why should we care about this metric?

----------

• Page Depth - the number of pages a reader opens after the initial article they started with. Higher page depth can indicate better loyalty towards, or interest in, your brand.
• Not to be confused with scroll depth, which is how far someone scrolled through an article.

----------

This is another interesting finding because it shows how willing people are to consume more and the results are therefore really encouraging. Everything in media is about loyalty, relevance and engagement and you'll only build a strong connection with your audience if you play a significant role in their lives.

That role will depend on your titles and your place in the market, but whatever your niche, if people are willing to consume more from you, then it’s already a proxy sign signal to you that you’re doing something right.

Put it this way: if there’s roughly a 10% difference between non-focused articles and focused articles on an annual basis that will make a difference.

Let’s talk about loyalty. Why should it have your attention?

The results were really strong here, weren’t they?

One of the best Nieman Labs predictions for this year was written by Sarah Marshall from Conde Nast and she actually wrote exactly about the increasing importance of this.

In any newsroom, you need to take care of fattening up yourself in the middle of your funnel. A lot of the time we (talking generally about our industry) are good at converting people once they’re ready to be converted, but the difficulty is with the middle of the funnel, because you potentially have these flybys or irregular users who could be regular readers. It makes a big difference if people come to you four times a month or once a month.

It’s a basic, almost pedestrian, thing to say, but really looking after loyalty and making sure that people who already have expressed an interest in what you do are being looked after will ultimately in the long term give you more return for your buck.

So, let’s say I work for a newsroom. I’ve read all the stuff, and I’m convinced about user needs. I want to roll out the idea with my team. What next? How do I actually start producing more user need-focused content?

It takes me back to where it all started. When members of BBC’s audience research department came to me with the idea that there are such things as user needs in what I think was 2016, I knew I loved the idea. It is a different approach and to start, you need people who really want to play ball with you. Choose editors who don’t need much convincing. Once you’ve got tangible results you can share, it becomes much easier to roll it out further.

I’d start with looking at maybe the last six months’ content from one section. Assign user needs to them retrospectively, see what worked, and what didn’t. At this point you’ll probably form some kind of hypothesis: it might be that you ask your team to create ten ‘Educate me’ content pieces every month because you know they work really well. So you start there, analyse your results as you go, and once you’ve turned around one section, you start basically internally socialising the hell out of it. You say: this is what we tried, and this is what works.

What in your opinion do you need to change in the editorial and creation process if you start to demand or commission user need focused articles?

It’s simply that first you’ll say, ‘ok this is the story’ and then you’ll say ‘please do it from this particular user needs standpoint’

I’m obsessed with planning. I think it’s enormously important to be purposefully focused on what you’re trying to do with every single piece of content that you’re creating. It’s important because we need to move away from the knee jerk reaction of just following the news feed, and we need to be much more organised about how we want to present our own newsbrands, and what each of us are really there for.

I’m not saying in any way that we need to distort the news agenda, but rather that we need to be specific about what you do with each piece of content. Cover what you want to cover, but be very specific about what you’re trying to do with each article that you publish. It’s not just format; before you take a decision on that, you always need to think about what kind of user need you’re addressing.

You’ve obviously gone from being a consultant, talking about this, to being at the helm of Ringier Media International. Is this how people are working there now?

We have quite a sophisticated way of turning individual media round one after another, and every month we get together, sit down and look at individual titles, and each presents their very specific plan of how they’ll turn around one particular section of the website. This is key: I don’t think you should be focusing on turning around a newsroom as a whole - it’s better to start with a section.

That’s a key recommendation then? Start with a single section?

Yes. The focus is helpful: you can actually say that one collection of user needs for a particular section is X, Y & Z, and maybe you’ll ignore A, B & C for the time being - but your colleague in a different section might be using those. Treat sections as niches.

It’s a really important thing to train the user needs muscle inside the newsroom. Starting your morning meetings by allocating five minutes to ask everybody to come up and brainstorm one topic or idea is a simple way to start incorporating this approach into the everyday workflow.

What about the journalists who are skeptical about the model, who are convinced that writing from the gut is the right thing to do?

Maybe a little bit of gut feeling is a useful thing to start with. It’ll develop from there. Once you start thinking about optimising your output on a bigger scale, over a longer period of time, across many, many sectors, data will help you for sure.

Once I was changing a newsroom, uniting radio and digital and one person refused to move from one room to another to sit with his colleagues because he said that he’d been sitting at that window for twenty years, and didn’t want to change.

But you’ll always get a few who are sketpical….

… exactly. But there’s a lot we aren’t changing: I don’t care about the topic of your coverage. Your journalistic intuition there is still important. What I really care about is audience centricity, and thinking about how audiences receive the news.

One final question: what about tagging? We’ve often found that when journalists start using the model, there’s a difficulty there. What’s your take on this?

I think there are three components to consider here.

Firstly, if a person decided to create a ‘Educate me’ story, they’ll need to choose that in the CMS that they’re writing an ‘Educate me’ story. That’s one thing.

Second thing is, that inside the CMS, once you’re writing an Educate me story, the CMS needs to be clever enough to analyse your copy and say, well, actually, you chose ‘Educate me’, but your article is looking unfocused in terms of user needs. If you can do this, you’ll be able to try better, or make necessary changes.

The last thing is that remembering that you’ll never get a 100% single user needs article - there’s always a bit of a mix in there. But you can ensure that you hit that 60% mark and make sure that you’re focused in on the key user need.

All of this comes back to journalists needing to be very clear about what they’re doing in the first place: who is the audience, what do they need, and how can I deliver it.

That’s the key takeout, really, isn't it?

Yes: Think about what you’re trying to address and what it is that you want to get across with your audience.

When we wrote our first white paper we analysed ten newsrooms and looked at the three metrics of engagement, conversion and reach. None of those ten newsrooms had much in common, but the results were encouraging. Here we have an even larger body of data and the results are unambiguous. This is basically your smoking gun. You don’t need to ask the question of ‘if’ they work anymore. We’ve answered it once and for all.