Todo Noticias engages audience with disruptive mobile experience
Ideas Blog | 02 September 2015
In 2014, we started working on a new mobile experience for Todo Noticias (TN), the leading TV news channel in Argentina. We wanted to create a disruptive and innovative mobile platform from scratch.
The main goal was to reach mobile audiences on the most popular mobile platforms: phones, smartphones, and tablets.
This new mobile experience was conceived with a big focus on data analysis and user experience design. The project included new mobile native apps for iOS and Android and a new mobile web version. Back in 2013, we had published new apps for Blackberry and Windows Phone.
Each of these mobile platforms had a different focus, based on our main goals.
Live TV and video: Because TV and video are our big differentials, we integrated the best quality live streaming video and video on demand (VOD) with our mobile platforms. Currently, users can watch our live TV news channel 24/7, 365 days a year, across all mobile gadgets.
We serve different quality streams for different type of gadgets and connections. When there is breaking news, we run up to six live streaming events at the same time exclusively for our digital and mobile audiences.
Native apps: We focused on breaking news and live video for our native apps. In October 2014, we reached 1.5 million total app downloads. All the UX/UI design on our mobile app experience was based on data we extracted from many services such as Google Analytics, Chartbeat, Clicktale, and other sources.
The apps have five big mobile gestures: scroll, slide, tap, long press, and shake. They are designed as natural extensions of our hands. Users can navigate the apps using a vertical scroll that presents content as cards, or a horizontal slide that shows the full content. In addition, users can shake their phones to immediately access our live stream.
Users can customise their app experience in different ways. For example, they can personalise geographic location, notifications, and the topic cover for the start.
We also integrated new push notifications into the apps such that breaking news is constantly looking for an audience. Now, users can simply wait for the news to reach their hands. However, our notifications are not invasive for users. We provide custom sounds and vibrations so that users can select the topics for which they want to receive alerts.
These custom settings also allow us to better understand the audience and make quick changes to the product.
Mobile web: In July 2015, we reached more than 14 million unique browsers (comScore) at our Web mobile site, which is 60% of out total Web traffic.
We developed the new site, taking into account the limitations in speed and connectivity of the 3G network in Argentina. The three pillars of our internal pages design were readability, services, and participation.
Services are segmented by local regions and cities of Argentina. For example, our weather service provides data for at least 3,000 cities. You can see the services at the following sites:
Our audience, our core. At “TN and the People,” our citizen journalism community, users can upload pictures, videos and text to the site using any smartphone or tablet. Some of this user-generated content makes it all the way to our TV shows.
Users also help us report the news. In addition, our audience can participate directly in our TV programmes using trivia and surveys. They are part of our second screen strategy.
Social media is an important part of our mobile strategy. In August 2015, we reached 5.3 million fans on Facebook and 3 million followers on Twitter.