01/03
In today's international news landscape, we find a multitude of players constantly having to adapt to new usages. A wide variety of readers live side by side, with specific needs and different sensitivities to be taken into account country by country, while respecting journalistic neutrality. It is in this context that we helped France Media Monde redesign their applications.
Data analysis, Benchmark, Audit, Workshops, Users Survey, Prototype
Figma / Typeform / Miro / Office Suite
5 months
1
Discovery
Creating a competitive benchmark based on the client’s problematics
2
Research
Understanding user needs and requirements through data analysis, user survey and UX Audit
3
Prioritization
Scoping and prioritizing the user stories through a PXL model
4
UI & Style Guides
Creating wireframes and prototypes to visualize the user interface
5
Recommendations
Helping to share the learnings and the ambitions of the project to the whole company
France Media Monde (FMM) group is a national broadcasting and publishing company that supervises and coordinates the activities of French state-owned public radio and television stations with international broadcasting. In this project, we worked on redesigning the applications of France 24, Radio France Internationale (RFI) and Monte Carlo Doualiya (MCD). These applications share a common technical base. The digital audience totalized 46.3M monthly visits in 2021 on the 3 apps combined, with an increase of 40% to 45% between 2017 and 2021.
We had 3 main objectives when doing the benchmark: identify the digital strategies of the existing media apps, identify UX functionalities and identify practices of interest for the redesign (focused on accessibility, fluidity, format enhancement, functional modes, audience interaction).
The presentation to the client was split in 4 parts: trends and evolutions in media industry (based on benchmark and studies), competitors practices along the user journey, opening to other practices elsewhere (social medias, communities, new media, ...) and a synthesis to see the placement of FMM apps compared to other media.
This table presents anonymized data and fictitious results for illustrative purposes
We had 3 main objectives when doing a data analysis: gain a better understanding of the audience for FMM apps, track user behavior and identify usage trends.
Based on the exploration from the App stores, Piano Analytics, and other feeds, we learned:
An aging audience in the returning visitors may be based on the reputation of the brand
Some peaks in the visitors based on the news but don’t stay in the app (ex : announce of the Ukraine war)
People come at specific hours to listen news lives because FMM apps are well known for their TV and radio shows
Users are mostly concentrated in cities, especially in Africa, where it could be due to connection shortage in more rural areas
We chose to conduct user survey for several reasons:
The scope of the exploratory survey
The survey concerns the France 24 and RFI mobile applications. It has been divided by mobile operating system (iOS, Android) and by application, to simplify management of the representativeness of the results.
Target
All users of the French-language mobile application, considered as engaged (having recently used the application).
Structure
47 open and closed questions, to identify the behaviors and expectations of users, divided into 5 parts. A breakdown of questions, from the general (consumption habits) to the specific (application usage and user profiles).
Potential bias
An equitable iOS / Android harvest target not representative of actual distributions. The sample surveyed represents only the heart of the active and committed FMM app community.
Objective and answers rate
An objective of 1000 answers, 250 in each configuration to have a sufficient representation. Survey proposed via push in-app in France 24 and RFI.
Generally speaking, which news formats do you like best? (Survey)
This chart presents anonymized and fictitious results for illustrative purposes
We did a presentation in order to give useful data we could gather. This presentation included 3 parts : audience and media consumption, audience's preferences & usage of FMM applications and audience's perceptions and needs.
Here are some findings and lessons learned:
A loyal audience mostly in Europe and French-speaking Africa
Diversification of formats are in demand by users, particularly young people, in line with current communication codes and trends
Many users have commented on how difficult it is to navigate the application
We also defined 4 profiles of users that I can’t develop here for non disclosure reasons.
The audit was structured around 5 major sections that focus our main findings on apps:
Each finding is accompanied by recommendations. The areas for improvement identified during the presentation are summarized and transposed into functionalities to guide the rest of the project.
This screenshot is purposely unzoomed for non disclosure reasons
We organized 2 workshops of 2h each in order to scope the functionalities in a Backlog, the process flows and KPIs in different sprints. To do so we used a PXL model in order to prioritize objectively the user stories and the key screens we would have to design. The PXL model was adapted with categories useful for FMM and took into account their internal political issues between teams.
We based our reflections on the 4 personas we could determine during the users survey and the user stories we determined through the whole research.
We focused on key screens:
In order to give a stronger differentiation while keeping the same technical basis, the UI accented specificities for each application with colors and focused on audio for RFI, video for France 24.
This screenshot is purposely unzoomed for non disclosure reasons
It's even more important than usual to explain and justify our choices, because FMM is an institutional company that comes from print before being present on the Web. With the aim of convincing their hierarchy of the merits of these changes, and federating the whole company in the pursuit of continuous improvement, we supported the product team in the creation of a complete presentation.
Moreover, we also did new screens in order to show them what the future of the app could be without any technical issues.
Through this investigation we were able to uncover more information from the users regarding their habits, problems and needs. We also focused on the player and video contents that are core to the apps. The client was enthusiastic and eager to integrate those recommendations to analyze their users’ feedbacks.
From a personal perspective, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to discover media apps with a strong international aspect. It was really interesting to work with habits and usages I didn’t know about.
