Exploring news through words
Company
Reverb
Role
Product Manager
Scope
Mobile app, U.S. and Canada
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Have you ever watched a TED talk and thought, “That should be a company!” Years ago, wordsmith Erin McKean delivered a TED talk on her vision around the lexicography and meaning of words. This particular talk struck a chord with an investor in the audience, who encouraged her to build a company around her idea. The company is called Wordnik, which I joined in time to launch Reverb, a platform to help people find meaningful content, and crafted tools for content understanding at every level from the single word on up.
Given the ability to extract key concepts from online content, the ability to model concepts by concept and topic, and the option to connect with world news and social news, we decided to deliver a news discovery experience that delights users and helps them learn a bit along the way. Ultimately, debuted with an iPad application that enables readers to discover news that matters from the world, their social networks, or their own interests with minimal setup. Enable serendipitous discovery.
Solutions
1. Use Words to Navigate
Given the company's roots as wordniks, it’s not surprising that the Reverb app opens with a gorgeous Word Wall interface. We believe that words make for exquisite navigation. The opening Word Wall view gives a descriptive overview of the news landscape and makes it easier to dive deeper with a single tap.
Survey the news
in descriptive terms
2. Different modes for different moods
Sort and prioritize articles into three separate content streams that help you effortlessly discover more of what you want to read and less of what you don’t:
Me - stream for personalized interests and stories
Friends - stream that collects articles shared through social network connections
News - stream that keeps you on top of breaking news from respected news sources from around the world
Secondary options to chart a specific path:
History - retrace your steps
Add Interest - name your course
History - retrace your steps
Add Interest
3. Help getting to the root of your interests
Who collects the most interesting words? Whose collection descriptively demonstrates a growing understanding of their interests?
We held a collection competition in-house that led to some important insights that influenced our redesign.
Outcomes
2. Extended sessions: readers spend 5-8 times longer in the app
than competitors, hopefully discovering relevant and absorbing recommendations.
Engagement with recommended reads: 2 orders of magnitude higher
than competitors, perhaps because Reverb is based on lexical relevance, rather than demographics.
Reception
“This super-smart news reader is built on the world’s largest dictionary”
“Wordnik and Reverb for Publishers are still operating. But the reader app feels like the product Reverb has been building up to all along. It gives consumers more direct access to the power of the Word Graph by analyzing stories across the Web and distilling them into concepts relevant to the user’s interests.”
“Reverb’s namesake product is a news discovery mobile application that recommends stories based on contextual clues in the words of the article.”
“Reverb’s recommendations — both through our app and on the web — really resonate with readers, and are very valuable to publishers! It’s very exciting to build something that both delights consumers and makes money for publishers.”