The latest iteration of the South China Morning Post Web site has landed, offering SCMP’s millions of digital global readers a cleaner, easier-to-navigate news product with enhanced readability at its core.

Spanning nearly a year, the ambitious company-wide project employed a collaborative, cross-team approach that integrated continuous user feedback and insights, along with an iterative design methodology.

The objectives were divided into five parts:

1. Enhance user experience.
2. Improve readability.
3. Increase engagement and encourage deeper interaction.
4. Improve the impact of advertising.
5. Launch SCMP Plus, a premium news product designed for business leaders and China watchers.

Enhanced UX leads the way

Recognising the growing issue of news and information fatigue worldwide, a key objective of the SCMP.com refresh was to address this challenge proactively. The redesigned SCMP.com offers a cleaner and more navigable interface, enhancing both user experience and site loading speed.

We leveraged data-driven insights to inform our strategy, including an eye-tracking survey to understand Web page scanning patterns. We also conducted hundreds of hours of reader interviews and usability testing and evaluated countless prototypes.

The outcome provided a comprehensive picture of how our readers interacted with SCMP, helping ensure the best possible iteration of the SCMP’s flagship digital experience.

Less clutter, improved readability

By reducing distractions and simplifying templates, readers can now enjoy uninterrupted browsing and clutter-free content exploration on SCMP.com.

On article pages, topline information has been streamlined, with shorter headlines, text prioritised over the main image and an essential summary of the article. Thoughtful extras, such as increasing in-body headings, removing the left-hand column on desktop, and refining article transitions (by decreasing scroll time), further enhance readability across the site.

A key objective of the design improvements was to encourage reader engagement with our award-winning, world-class news content. As such, we’ve enhanced content recommendations for both subscribers and non-subscribers — optimising overall content discoverability across the site. 

Index pages have been redesigned, while topic pages are now categorised (People, Locations, Companies, etc.) with accompanying structured data. These changes have been applied to more than 5,000 index pages.

In addition, by adding a secondary navigation bar, we can now dynamically highlight trending topics, enabling readers to access relevant and timely news content more quickly.

An opportunity for ad improvement

The refresh was also a prime opportunity to improve our digital display advertising for both advertisers and readers. We’ve taken the time to adjust ad placement and ratios, ensuring a more impactful and considered approach. The updates to our ad offering have further enhanced overall reader satisfaction, whilst improving ad recall and engagement.

In addition to the host of design and navigation improvements, we also saw the opportunity to add extra value to SCMP.com in the form of an entirely new product. The result is SCMP Plus, a bespoke platform aimed at premium subscribers seeking to navigate China’s complexities.

Featuring a dedicated dashboard on SCMP.com, SCMP Plus provides invaluable intelligence and insight into China’s policies, economy and geopolitics, through curated analysis, summaries, fact sheets, opinion, and more.

Our results so far

To date, the results of SCMP.com’s refresh have been impressive.

Within the first three months of launch, we saw a 20% increase in product satisfaction, a 5% increase in article pageviews per session, and a 4% decrease in bounce rate, helping create a better experience for readers and impact for advertisers. The Interaction Next Print (INP) score was also reduced by 48%, which underscored improved usability and satisfaction.

Following the refresh, readers are spending more time on SCMP.com, with the article completion rate increasing by 73% on mobile and 8% on desktop. At the same time, SCMP Plus has achieved a global reach of 160,000 and 5% paid subscriptions.

The updates are far from over, with SCMP continuing to roll out improvements and optimisations over the coming months and years. Keep an eye on what’s new by visiting SCMP.com.

Images courtesy of South China Morning Post.

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