Opportunity

To strengthen their position as a full-range media monitoring tool, NewsWhip decided to integrate Reddit into the platform. I was the lead designer on this feature. I drove the research, design and development from inception to delivery. I worked with NewsWhip and Reddit leadership to ensure our solution was respecting everyone's brand and content requirements. This was a great opportunity to showcase my system design skills – adapting Reddit content into our existing platform framework.

Research

Reddit was a new opportunity for NewsWhip as they broadened their tools beyond the traditional media channels. Myself and the PM interviewed a wide range of customers to establish where Reddit sat in their workflow, its value and its issues.

We quickly learnt that not everyone used Reddit but for those that do, it's an essential tool to track public sentiment. Demographically it was very focused on men aged 18–35. Its journalistic value was closely tied to niche topics such as cars and computer games.

Screen showing Reddit content within the NewsWhip monitoring dashboard.

Design Strategy

The big challenge was adapting a very established content framework to sit within the NewsWhip structure. One particular difficulty was introducing threaded commentaries which brought deeper structured content than we'd had before. Solving this required good systems thinking and an open mind.

An example of adapting Reddit's threaded content to display in NewsWhip's Article Detail panel.

Product opportunities

Our research told us that even hardened users of Reddit struggled to find useful content fast. To improve this we introduced a number of innovative features such as the count of comments that match their keywords, community leaderboards and top scoring comment shortcuts.

Our Top Communities view which included a breakdown of activity. This enabled users to more accurately gauge how useful a community's output would be.

Results

A very rewarding project to work on. An autonomous team working in direct communication with users enabled us to iterate quickly and build a really useful feature for a specific user type.