Reuters Connect

Established in 1851, Reuters is an international news agency offering a variety of subscription services allowing Broadcasters, Publishers, Brands, Agencies and other content creators to receive, cite and otherwise distribute their content.

Reuters engaged us as their strategic partner to develop a new digital platform entitled Reuters Connect that would consolidate three existing platforms to one where subscribers could review, download and manage content thereby streamlining their workflow. They also wanted to allow Reuters clients to monetize the content they create in order to grow and transform their global business.

This redesign has been a huge success for Reuters with more and more users migrating to this new platform each day. We continue to help them expand and adjust features based on user feedback and our roadmap.

Fully understanding the platform, issues, and needs across a wide user base was vital to build an efficient tool that would streamline workflow. Moreover, none of us ever worked in a newsroom. We had to talk to people to truly be able to empathize with them and build a tool that they would be able to find useful.

We interviewed key stakeholders at Reuters to get an understanding of their business needs. We conducted a competitive analysis to understand the full breadth of tools our users had access to.

We also audited the existing platforms to get an understanding of what they were using and the respective features and functionality.

Some examples of the platforms we audited are as follows:

One MVP was shipped our next focus was creating the Live feed. The market for online video is booming with the expectation to reach $121.27 billion by 2020. Tied to this is the increase in demand for live video streaming solutions.

For Reuters to compete in this arena, they had to create a Live product that could appeal to our primary personas - Traditional Broadcasters (e.g., NBC), the "New" Newspapers (e.g., The New York Times), and Digital Publishers (e.g., Buzzfeed). They wanted to have 6 streaming channels with content in a wide range of formats from mobile streaming to broadcast quality, that is ready to be published across devices.

We had to create an interface that worked seamlessly within the platform, yet delivered this Live content in a manner that was adaptable for the needs of each user type. We started off by sketching the experience, then testing and increasing fidelity as we iterated. Below are some highlights from this process.

Post-launch, we were tasked with creating an evergreen space for curated collections and discovery content. This feature just launched and I look forward to being able to share more details and results with you all. You can see the InVision prototype here.