Hubbard Broadcasting case study — Ryan Mahato, Product Manager

1 The problem

A broadcaster’s website has two very different groups of users. The audience wants to find, read and watch quickly, on whatever device they have. The TV and radio station staff upload multimedia, articles and news every day, and need tools that keep up with them. The product had to serve both.

2 What I learned about users

My main job was analysing millions of user interactions: what people read, where they dropped off and what kept them coming back.
Reaching more readers meant reaching them quickly on their phones.
Readers wanted a choice of ways to pay for a subscription.
The station staff who publish every day are users too, and their tools set the pace for the whole site.

3 What I built or changed

Ran data-driven development: features and their priority were decided by user behaviour, user needs and what the business could support.
Created a fast mobile (AMP) version of the website through an API on AWS Lambda (Node.js) to reach more mobile readers, plus an image processing service behind AWS API Gateway.
Built a subscription system supporting multiple payment methods.
Shaped the publishing tools around how the station staff worked.
Tuned the site for speed and for the placement of ads and articles, based on traffic and behaviour.
Automated the migration of a large archive of articles and categories from the old ColdFusion site to the new WordPress site, and removed slow queries and scripts before launch.

4 The result

A site whose priorities came from how millions of people actually used it: faster on mobile, easier to subscribe to, and backed by publishing tools fitted to the staff who fed it every day.

Behaviour analysis
Data-driven prioritisation
AMP
AWS Lambda
API Gateway
Node.js
Subscriptions
WordPress migration