MoonLite App - The Dallas Morning News

A LEAN BACK EXPERIENCE FOR THOSE WHO LIKE READING AT NIGHT

MY ROLE
Direction | Ideation & Wireframes | Prototype | Project Management

THE OPPORTUNITY
After we launched the first native app for the Dallas Morning News, a usage peak during the evening triggered my curiosity.

THE VISION
A lean back experience that helps you get the best out of Dallas without weighing you down at the end of the day.

Ideation

 I selected a multidisciplinary team, to:
- Conceptualize a lean back experience
- Define target audience, personas
- Wire frame ideas for immediate testing, further research

UX Research: Defining the target audience

To determine whether to pursue further development of these concepts, I facilitated a few workshops to gauge and optimize the market potential and develop two core personas.

High level concept: Rewind + Relax + Reset

Brainstorming sessions

I rented a room at the Omni Hotel across our building and took the team there for a mini-retreat of two days. The brain follows the body, the physical surroundings. Changing where we brainstormed from the usual to a new room was a good idea.

The team freed themselves from the business as usual thinking, started creating target personas, content ideas, potential features that fit both the audiences and the technical capabilities of a native app.

Strategic Brief & Pricing Comparison

From our brainstorming sessions I summarized our assumption into a brief that would clarify the ultimate purpose of the project at a high level. We also did some comparative analysis, especially on pricing as it was one of the key business decisions we needed to answer.

Prototyping the Experience

Key features & Wireframes

• How Dallas Works with animated graphics that explain complex financial topics in graphics and voice-over.

• Behind the scenes at locally-shot TV and movies

• Interviews and mini-concerts with musical acts coming through town

• Tours of beautiful and exclusive places, such as the most expensive hotel room in Dallas.

• Local Highlights from museum installations, both to help you understand the art and to tease the show.

Focus Groups

I asked Ipsos to help us run focus groups. Under my direction, they recruited the attendees, facilitated the sessions and synthesized the results. The overall results were positive. Here are some of the highlights:

• Customization, long-form and very visual stories are most important.

• 6 pm is the preferred publishing time.

• Geography down to zip code is important to ~50% of sample.

• The “MoonLite” concept had good odds of success (~70%) when priced between free and $5.99/month.

• More than 80% are skeptical that the product will be well executed at $0.99 or free.