Launching Three News Verticals for the Media Giant

Accelerating NBC News Digital

NBC News brought Code and Theory onboard to activate their design, product, and technical teams—as well as partner with multiple editorial teams to achieve toward these two ambitious goals. And the four pilot sites had to be ready to launch in 4 months.

The verticals are Mach (the future, space, and innovation vertical), Better (the lifestyle vertical focused on small obtainable change), Leftfield (the international video first vertical determined to create short docs and features for a younger generation) and Think.

The Challenge

Code and Theory partnered with NBC News in-house teams across a wide range of areas to focus on and rethink existing paradigms, including editorial workflows, design and development processes, design systems, advertising integration, and technical approach.

We found that the most effective way to forge this kind of tight partnership was to weave ourselves into the NBC News team across editorial, product, design and development. This meant matching discipline leads together early in the timeline, creating a number of bespoke working and collaboration sessions, and co-locating key teams to ensure efficiency, fluidity, unity, and success across the whole project.

With the future goal of expanding the project to the rest of NBC News in mind, we needed to build a scalable system that was both designed with these verticals in mind, but also flexible enough to adapt in time to the more intensive and custom needs across their larger digital ecosystem. For example, each vertical’s front page needed a distinct look, feel, and information density that reflected its unique content and audience, but ultimately still needed to be built with a core of common component and be designed to clearly look and feel like a part of NBC News.

We mapped out a plan to build a central library of all the shared page elements and reuse them across the verticals, again with their future use on other NBC News properties in mind. This meant that every design decision had to consider the implications on the larger ecosystem, but it would allow for a more seamless delivery of updates to the site for years to come

The Strategy

Early on, the NBC News team made two key decisions about the vertical’s business. The first was to focus on building a distinct and loyal audience based on an affinity for the content and POV on each vertical. The second was to pursue a sponsorship-driven ad strategy for launch.

Freed of the need to push audience and display impression-driven scale at all costs and given the clean sheet of paper that comes with a new launch, we focused our experience strategy on capturing and retaining high-value users and offering advertisers more bespoke ad integrations that would be possible on large, existing properties. We wanted to amplify the impact of the stories and drive more meaningful, long-term value for audiences—and ultimately, for our advertising partners.

This required stripping down the editorial toolkit to its most basic parts and then building it back up. Through that process we laid the foundation of a scalable modular system with a library of necessary page components that met the core storytelling and packaging needs of each vertical, that can be stacked, arranged, and repurposed on any page in numerous ways. The approach opened us up to refocusing on storytelling craft, doing more with less, and allowing editors to easily manage curated and dynamic content packages with variable visual hierarchies and content densities to give each vertical a distinct voice and feel.

Our strategic framework focused on re-establishing audience connections with NBC as a trusted news source, through the stories we delivered and the perspectives we wrapped them in and to do that at scale with advertisers integrated into the storytelling framework.

The Solution

Make a Connection

We built a limited, but flexible, set of storytelling tools that allowed editors to focus on creating a strong editorial voice and building trust in our ability to deliver engaging and immersive original content responsive to the user's context.

Built for Scale

We designed and developed a modular and scalable design system that could extend far beyond the verticals we launched. The packages were created to flex across variable content densities and to address unique editorial and content type needs. Ultimately, each bucket was constructed to work dynamically and allow editors to not just curate content, but also editorialize it with inline quotes or media.

Knowing we would be adapting this framework to changing user needs across an evolving set of verticals and brands, we laid the foundations for a living style guide and a future implementation of React, building our own custom javascript framework called “Ramen.”

The Conclusion

On June 1st, we released Better and Mach. Leftfield followed two weeks after, and Think launched in January 2018. We are currently working to apply the design system to the rest of NBCNews.com, MSNBC.com, and TODAY.com.