Refreshed South China Morning Post homepage elevates reader-first experience
- After nearly a year in the making, the Post’s homepage enters a new era, offering a host of improved features and a fresh new design
- Feedback from readers and cross-team collaboration a key part of the revamp
December 2023 marks the exciting launch of the redesigned South China Morning Post homepage on SCMP.com, bringing our readers a host of new features and a more dynamic, reader-first experience.
The SCMP homepage is visited by millions of users from around the world every month. Our readers turn to us for breaking news updates, China and Asia insight and thought-provoking op-eds, which inform and empower them in their day-to-day lives. For the homepage revamp, facilitating an exceptional reader experience was therefore of the utmost importance.
As such, the project was almost a year in the making. Reader feedback, market research and cross-department input from multiple teams across the SCMP – including Editorial, Product and Data – played a vital role in the process. This ground-up, collaborative approach gave us an opportunity to design a page that reflected real and meaningful benefits to you, our highly-valued online audience. So what is new?
Outstanding user experience
One of the key areas of feedback, gathered through rounds of reader interviews and usability testing, was the issue of information overload. Today’s digital world is extremely busy and trusted news brands need to find a way to cut through the noise and ensure that news content is easily findable on a well-structured page.
Our existing homepage, which has been in operation for four years, was a good foundation for this, so we decided to enhance and refine. The new streamlined design is sleeker and cleaner, making it easier to digest articles on the go. Having two columns instead of three and more white space allow readers to locate core content fast, while navigation has been upgraded with a new one-line top menu.
We’ve updated our section and topic labels to include a wider variety, enabling you to dive deep into areas specific to your interests with ease. The redesign has also reduced the need for swiping, allowing you to easily skim the page with vertical scrolling.
Improved content discovery
With this in mind, we reviewed our balance of content and improved our variety. You will now find new spots for “Multimedia”, “Focus” and “Things to do in Hong Kong”, which feature award-winning videos, visuals and interactives, alongside content personalisation tailored to your interests. We encourage you to dive in and explore our diverse ways of storytelling and delivering the news.
Optimised page performance
With the homepage revamp, we saw an opportunity to improve this. We optimised performance by refactoring the page and updating our technical framework to provide a fresher – and faster – reading experience. The result? Lightning-fast loading speed, optimised for mobile.
Next steps
The initial response to the new homepage has been extremely positive. Readers are now scrolling up to 41 per cent further down the page on desktop, which in turn helps them discover a wider variety of content. What’s more, the launch of the refreshed homepage is just the start. Taking our collaborative learnings and insights from the project, we will be bringing you even more site enhancements and improvements soon, all underpinned by our “reader-first” approach.
