Client
CNN Digital
Role
Product Designer
Date
2022
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Context
CNN is a 24-hour American news channel that covers everything from global politics to entertainment.
At the start of our collaboration with CNN's Digital Team, the mobile app lacked robust audio functionality. We worked closely with them to enhance the in-app mobile audio experience, focusing on implementing text-to-speech (TTS) feature functionality. We aimed to design a strategy that would improve user engagement and content consumption while additionally catering to new audiences at a low cost, leveraging their existing written material and surfacing potential partnerships through the utilization of text-to-speech.
The introduction of text-to-speech offered CNN significant opportunities, as competitors reported experiencing up to three times more completed stories, increased engagement, and longer time spent in their apps after implementing this feature.
This initiative set in place a concept timeline for the release of various text-to-speech features in their mobile app, following an impact/feasibility hierarchy for release.
Feature discovery
To ensure ease of use and nudge adoption of the text-to-speech features, we made sure to put them in expected and easily discoverable locations.
Home Page:
The "Catch Me Up" banner is a collection of the top news of the week
Story Cards:
We surfaced TTS icons on each story card on the home page
Story Pages:
We added a TTS icon at the top of each story page and within each story
Saved Stories:
You'll also see the icon on the bookmarks page for listening to your saved articles.
Autoplay playlists
Catch me up
Customization + inclusivity
Given CNN's global audience, we wanted to ensure the launch of text-to-speech would cater to this audience in an inclusive way.
By including voice fonts, we create a customizable experience that feels more personal to each reader - making their news delivery that much stronger.
Because of our timeline and position within the organization, we focused on designing a strategy and foundation for implementing a feature set that could realistically be launched and deliver value for CNN's audience and business. Text-to-speech functionality was chosen as the ideal high-impact, highly-desirable feature for this project. We're excited to see how the CNN digital team will build upon this foundational work in the future.
To learn more about our research and process behind this project, feel free to reach out
