Crafting better user experiences for one of the biggest media companies in Finland.
Founded in 1934, Otavamedia is one of the oldest and most prolific players in the Finnish media landscape. Like many others of its kind, Otavamedia's publications are increasingly enjoyed in the online environment. With this in mind, Otavamedia asked us to help them in improving the digital user experience of their classic magazines. The main goals were driving more subscriptions and making the content easier to navigate.
We began our work with Suomen Kuvalehti – a classic publication of known for over a hundred years for its high-quality journalism. The focus was on creating clearer information architecture and making the user experience of the paywall system more fluid. The latter was built to serve as a future blueprint for other Otavamedia magazines as well.
Client
Otavamedia
Industry
Media
Platform
Web
Services
Service design / UX/UI Design / Prototypes
The online version of Suomen Kuvalehti was riddled with unclear user paths and confusing navigation. In order to fix the situation, we began the work by consulting the editors and auditing the whole current site. Moreover, we received invaluable user feedback collected by Digitalist Group.
Going through all this data, the pieces began to fall into place. The new user experience feels much cleaner, the articles are easier to find and making new subscriptions is now hassle-free.
Ida Silaste, UX Designer, Taiste
We're big believers in the benefits of prototyping. For Otavamedia, we tested a prototype of the service with the editors and end-users in two rounds. In the first one, we tackled the overall user experience – in the second one, we added a visual layer.
Moreover, the user interviews were conducted so that Otavamedia's representatives could also come and hear the comments straight from the users – this was seen as eye-opening. When we began the implementation of the design work, we knew exactly what we were doing with no fear of missteps.
Like many other media companies, Otavamedia had implemented paywalls for many of their sites. The problem was, the customer path was unclear and the system worked differently for each publication. We audited the paywall system for Suomen Kuvalehti and rebuilt the user experience so that it could be duplicated for every other Otavamedia magazine, too.
The project required us to work together with various teams: Otavamedia's Product Owner represented the voice of the editorial staff, while the technical side of things needed to be discussed with the development team from Aste. Additionally, Digitalist Group was in charge of collecting user feedback online while we conducted the face-to-face interviews. Efficient project management was the key to making all this work and reinforcing the feeling that we were all working towards the same goal.
Riku Österlund
Head of Digital, Otavamedia
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