Concept: Reimagining Bookmarking & Sharing
Condé Nast Hackathon 2021
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Background
For the 2021 Condé Nast annual hackathon, two of my teammates and I banded together to propose a concept re-envisioning bookmarking & sharing across Verso, our design system. Readers struggle to keep track of what they want to read later — and they leverage a multitude of browser features such as news apps and emails in an effort to keep track. They report low awareness of our bookmarking features, which aren’t easily discoverable on our sites. They’re interested in bookmarking earlier in the reading experience, and need help being reminded to do so. And they tend not to use social share buttons on the page.
Team
Design: Hilary Lai, Sarah Chekfa (me)
Research: Isha Patnaik
Timeline
1 week
Goals
Through our explorations, we aimed to:
- Create greater awareness of bookmarking and sharing functionality
- Entice readers to bookmark and share content
- Remind readers to visit their bookmarked pages
Our concept
Bookmark icon overlay
We created a sticky bookmark icon that would overlay at the bottom of the screen, following the user down the page as they read through the article. Should a user realize that the article is particularly long-form, they can easily bookmark it to save for later.
Highlight to save & share
One of the things we wanted to explore was how we could drive value to encourage users to log in by providing them with a special feature that only logged-in users have access to: highlighting. Highlighting could be used as an avenue for users to save and share our content; saving would allow them to mark up articles with quotes that they want to remember down the line, and sharing would allow them to connect with friends and family over those quotes they’ve found that particularly speak to them.
We chose to mock up this experience using Instagram Stories as the social media avenue of choice, as data shows that 500 million people use Instagram Stories every day, and 58% of people say they’ve become more interested in a brand or product after seeing it in Stories. As we modernize our business model in an increasingly digitized and disconnected world, it’s important for us to pay attention to trends like this and re-architect our infrastructure to support new methods for content sharing that could drive new readers to our brands and increase time spent consuming our content.
We also created mockups detailing how the highlighting feature could appear for other brands across Verso. We wanted to make it easy to read and have the quote take precedence on the screen while also reinforcing the connection between that content and our brands:
Bookmark-centric recirculation
We devised two new forms of recirculation types. The first, shown below on the left, is a version featuring bookmarked articles, reminders users to read the articles they have saved previously. The second, shown below on the right, is a version that would require the refinement of our recirc algorithm to recommend stories similar to those previously bookmarked by the user:
Bookmark management
We wanted to ensure that a user would be able to access their saved bookmarks and highlights, so we presented a revamped conceptualization of the user account hub with three overarching tabs, one amassing both recently saved stories and highlights, and others featuring saved stories and highlights, respectively.
Final remarks
Our project won first place under the Innovate and Build Product category in the hackathon, and there is work on the horizon to explore ways of implementing various elements of this concept into our design system.
