Purpose

We wanted to provide customers with a suite of self-service tools to increase the value of their Apple News channels, primarily increasing the number of readers and engagement time, both metrics that are linked to the revenue share of Apple News.

Solution

I took on the role of leading the design and development of the Client Dashboard, working closely with the Customer Success Manager and customer stakeholders to prioritise features and breakdown the overall solution into small and manageable sprints. This method allowed us to build fast, deploy incremental versions and receive real feedback from users that fed into the prioritisation decision for the next set of features.

Core Features

1. Publish an Article: Customers could place a URL of an article they wished to publish on Apple News, this feature had a number of great uses from Apple News specific content that wasn't part of the main delivery or forcing an update through so that the article would appear at the top of feed, incredibly valuable during peak traffic times and seasonal events.
2. Evergreen Articles: Each day 5 new evergreen articles would be presented to the user. Evergreen articles are content pieces that are not linked to the news cycle, meaning they can be published and re-surfaced at any point. This feature enables publishers to generate engagement and revenue from recycled content.
3. Revenue Analysis: Apple News revenue is challenging to calculate and even more difficult to breakdown by specific articles. We built an analytics dashboard, that went above and beyond any tooling provided by Apple themselves to enable publishers to gain an insight into revenue generated by specific articles. In addition, we provided insights into they types of article formats, content topics that often performed well and times during the day they would see increased returns. All of these insights were driven from years of Apple News publishing data, increased by creating industry groups across the customer base.
4. Multi Publication Support: A solution for publishing house customers, who owned a number of content brands all delivering into their own Apple News channels. They needed an easy way to switch between the brands they control whilst still enjoying the valuables features deployed across the dashboard. We implemented a simple dropdown that created an incredibly seamless user experience.
5. Role Based Access: Publisher teams are often made of various roles, from journalists to editors. Customers told us during workshops that it was important to hide specific information and prevent certain actions from members in their teams. A number of roles were created with varying permissions to view and act within the dashboard, all managed from a central user management screen, controlled by Admin roles. RBAC also allowed for content specific brand teams to only view and act on the brands they controlled, whilst more privileged users were able to view more or all content brands associated with them.