How to get started with user needs: learnings from the Reuters Institute, Metro.co.uk and smartocto

Ever since the BBC pioneered a user needs strategy in 2016, user needs within news have grown as a trend such that it has been expanded upon, adapted by other news organisations, and most recently, got a dedicated chapter in the last Reuters Institute Digital News Report (DNR).

Listen more: RISJ Digital News Report 2024: User needs with Vogue and The Conversation

Simply put: user needs are a model to help newsrooms deliver on the needs of their audience to drive deeper engagement. But where and how do you start? Journalism.co.uk held a webinar last week (19 September 2019) to answer this question, bringing together the worlds of tech, academia and news.

What are user needs? 

The User Needs Model 2.0 - developed in partnership with former BBC digital development editor and analytics platform smartocto - provides four categories of reasons why people consume news, each containing two sub-categories:

Know – Fact driven

Update me: the standard news article that states the facts and updates the reader on what is happening. Who, what when where, why etc.

Keep me engaged: a type of story that involves the reader in current trends and allows them to contribute to the conversation.

Understand – Context driven   

Educate me: an article that helps the reader expand their knowledge and understanding of a topic, event or concept, potentially giving them more context on an ongoing story. 

Give me perspective: gives the user expert opinion, analysis, or important background so they can better understand an issue or story. 

Feel – Emotion driven 

Divert me: a distraction from negative news, with humour, intrigue, or light-hearted news stories. 

Inspire me: designed to leave the user with a positive feeling, often through inspiring personal stories of triumph, success or overcoming adversity.

Do – Action driven 

Connect me: provides deeper connected to a topic or issue through calls to action, announcements, opinion pieces or reports.

Help me: instructive and advice-lead content that helps audiences in their daily lives

How can my newsroom benefit from user needs? 

Dr Richard Fletcher, director of research, Reuters' Institute for the Study of Journalism, and said his chapter on user needs in the last DNR showed that most news audiences want 'update me' (64 per cent) and 'educate me' (59 per cent) content.

However, he also compared what needs people thought were most absent from the media to which were seen as most important. This data paints a very different picture.

'Inspire me' is underserved. It is the user need that is considered least well-served by the news but ranks second in priority (and is even more important amongst young audiences and news avoiders). 'Give me perspective' is another need often missing in the news, despite ranking highly in terms of user importance. Both represent untapped markets, especially for younger demographics and news avoiders.

Fletcher reasons that many news avoiders turn away from the news media feeling overwhelmed due to the large number of 'update me' stories.

How can I implement a user needs strategy into my newsroom? 

Metro.co.uk has been gradually implementing a user needs strategy in its newsrooms over the past six months or so. 

A common user needs journey starts by realising a newsroom is over-producing 'update me' news stories and under-producing stories for other valuable user needs. Metro.co.uk is a perfect example of this, as 'update me' stories are traditionally its bread and butter. It is testing out all the other user needs, but 'give me perspective' content in particular ranks high in terms of page views.

"We had to tell everyone to slow down a bit, try and get rid of that muscle memory of update me, update me, update me," explains Sofia Delgadeo, audience growth director, Metro.co.uk.

Its solution was "focus weeks", in which Delagdo's team sat down with each news desk for a few weeks and re-trained the reporters on SEO, data and, of course, user needs. This allowed reporters to take a break from producing content and to properly take stock of how well (or not) content was performing.

'Inspire me' content, she continues, has been hard to produce owing to journalists' tendency to cover negative content. It has been another lesson to drill into reporters the need for stories with a positive outlook.

She has found that other desks, like the entertainment and sport, lend themselves more naturally to these harder-to-produce user needs. Divert me content - the user need that ranked lowest in importance in the DNR - is another example of this.

So, how do I start working with user needs in mind? 

A user needs journey also starts by taking stock of a publisher's legacy data and tagging it with user needs to understand what content has historically been produced successfully and unsuccessfully.

This can be done manually, but while accurate, it is resource-intensive to do. Increasingly, automation can do take on this task in a fraction of the time, but is prone to errors.

• Read more: In defense of manual user needs tagging

Rutger Verhoeven, co-founder and CMO, smartocto, recommended a free tool that his team created to get you started. This AI tool will analyse your articles, telling you which user needs that you hit, which ones you missed, and what opportunities there were for you to hit something else that may have been absent before. 

"Analyse what you've done so far, see which user needs work best and which ones you need to use more," he advised.

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