5 Ideas To Improve Vox’s Card Stacks
On occasion of their one-year anniversary.
When I started Newsbound in 2011, I spent a lot of time interviewing casual news consumers in their twenties and thirties. Many of them talked about the frustration they feel with the article format; how they often click through to read something, then bounce after three paragraphs because the writer is assuming more knowledge than they possess.
I call these “three-and-out” readers. They’re not news junkies, but they regularly find themselves motivated to learn about an ongoing story or debate. It’s often a fleeting impulse, but an important one to capitalize on when it comes to generating greater demand for news.
In terms of assisting these underserved readers, Vox’s card stacks are the most promising experiment yet by a news outlet.
- They’re built for a long shelf life. That the card stacks are intended to appear alongside hundreds of relevant articles means writers can justify the amount of work it takes to assemble explainers this rich. They are the definition of stock.
- They’re modular. The FAQ format means that they can be reordered if necessary and specific cards can be highlighted or linked to directly.
- They’re update-able. Writers can add new cards or adjust the details as events warrant.
There simply aren’t a lot of examples of news outlets playing with structured, explanatory content in this way.
It’s an extremely ambitious experiment and one I want to see succeed. I really do. And that means expanding the reach and accessibility of the card stacks.
Below are five unsolicited, structural ideas for how to do just that.
#1: Take them higher (updated below)
Imagine a reader who comes to a Vox article via a Facebook link. They reach that infamous third paragraph, at which point they realize they don’t have all the pieces they need to comprehend the latest events in the story.
With card stacks, Vox has created a terrific resource for this potential “three-and-out” reader. Even better, they’ve carved out space in their article template for this catch-me-up content.
Unfortunately, that space is at the bottom of the article. This is like placing a pile of trail maps at the summit of a mountain. The people most likely to need it are also the least likely to come across it.
I’d love to see Vox treat their card stacks like information desks and position them more centrally, perhaps somewhere in the upper third of the article. Maybe the stack expands partially as the reader scrolls down. Maybe it lives in the sidebar and then opens into a modal. Maybe it starts as an inlay (similar to how they handle pull-quotes).
There are lots of design challenges here, but if the result is that more “three-and-out” readers find their way to the card stack they need — and are therefore more likely to engage with the subject matter in the future — it’ll be worth it.
UPDATE (5/29/15): Less than 24 hours after I published this piece, Vox pushed a big change to their card stacks technology that makes this first idea kind of a moot point. The stacks are now embeddable, which means that they’re: A) free to move to other sites, and B) free to move higher up in the articles they accompany. Very cool.
I hope they do some A/B testing to gauge how different placements affect engagement with both the card stack and the surrounding article. I also think a less-intrusive, expandable version of the embed could be wise, though I can also see how that might get complicated.
Thanks for the heads-up, Melissa!
#2: Give users a way to opt out
Let’s imagine for a second that Vox tweaked the article template so that card stacks appeared between a pair of early paragraphs. This would quickly become annoying for the reader who A) has already read the card stack in question, or B) doesn’t need or want the background info contained therein.
To solve this problem they could include a “I don’t need this” button (or something to that effect) that allows the reader to opt out.
After clicking this button, the card stack would vanish and no longer appear, at least interstitially, within any future articles on the subject. They could remember this preference via Vox’s user accounts or possibly just through cookies.
Providing this option could also create a useful feedback loop, giving the Vox team some data indicating their readers’ comfort level with certain subjects. By asking them directly if they need this resource, the button might even prompt some users to explore the stack who would have otherwise steered clear.
#3: Give users an easy way to read them later
One thing I’ve noticed in my own news consumption behavior is that I like to time-shift my background reading until a moment when I can give it my full attention. I’m sure many of the folks stumbling across Vox’s card stacks feel the same: “I need this … I really do … but I can’t read it right this minute.”
If Vox added a “Don’t need this” button, it could be accompanied by a “Save for later” button. If I selected this option, that card stack would be added to a queue associated with my user account.
To go a step further, I’d love to get a daily email from Vox that sent me one unread card out my queue of stacks. Over time, I could work through the cards, bite by bite. The email would also remind me of the stories I had expressed interest in weeks or months earlier — an antidote to the 24-hour news cycle. In the end, I’d gradually acquire knowledge about the issues of the day in a manageable and stress-free way.
It would be the equivalent of those inspirational daily desk calendars, except with timely and relevant facts instead of cheesy quotes.
#4: Make the card length more consistent
One of the frustrating things about reading a Vox card stack is that the density of each card is extremely variable.
If we assume that one of the goals of this format is to avoid overwhelming the reader, it would serve Vox well to enforce a maximum word count on each card. This would allow the user to develop expectations about what it means — in terms of time and mental energy — to delve into a new card stack or advance to the next card.
At Newsbound we’ve found that, when we establish a consistent flow, the reader knows what to expect and is more likely to stick with us. Indeed, our stack completion rates go up if the words-per-frame are in the same ballpark, even if this means the user has to click or tap more times to get to the end of a piece.
Reasonable constraints on card length could also have some beneficial side-effects. The editing would have to be tighter, for instance (never a bad thing). And the relative consistency might allow the designers to think more creatively and visually about presentation.
#5: Test all of the above
I obviously don’t have access to Vox’s analytics and no knowledge about the user experience research that went into the current iteration of the card stack. I’m sure there are numerous design considerations I haven’t fully thought through here. And it’s very possible that some of these proposals have already been discussed and discarded for good reason.
My hypothesis is that each of the four ideas above would have a statistically significant impact on the amount of engagement with the card stacks (measured by the number of card views, the time spent on each card, and the number of stack completions). But A/B testing might prove me be wrong.
Behind the Vox team’s decision to create their card stack library is a whole lot of empathy for the confused, overwhelmed reader. It’s the same type of empathy that spawned The New York Times’ topic page project in 2006.
Seven years later, however, the Times shut down the team tasked with actively curating the many thousands of topics pages in their library. While those pages were said to be responsible for around 2.5 percent of the nytimes.com traffic, that share probably wasn’t rising at a high enough clip to warrant five full-time staffers.
If traffic was indeed lagging, that wouldn’t be a surprise, considering that the design of those pages never seemed to get enough attention and iteration. No amount of diligent curation could overcome a neglected and unruly user experience.
My fingers are crossed that the same thing doesn’t happen at Vox.
Side-note: After my recent post on the rise of sequential visual stories, several readers wrote in to say: “Hey, why didn’t you include Vox’s card stacks?”
It’s a reasonable question:
- They clearly qualify as click-through reading experiences.
- They’re explanatory in nature (lord knows I love explainers).
- Also, hello, they’re called “stacks” — the same term we at Newsbound use to describe our brand of sequential visual stories.
On the other hand, Vox’s card stacks are far more dense than anything else on my list. Case in point: some of their individual cards are over 500 words long. As a result, they lack the forward momentum that characterizes this genre.
And while they’re sprinkled with graphics, the content isn’t inherently visual (nor intended to be, as far as I can tell).
While they may not qualify as “sequential visual stories,” I’m still very excited that Vox is investing in this resource. I think they’re doing a lot of things right. And I also see some ways to make them more accessible.
Want some more good thoughts on the challenges posed by Vox’s card stack experiment? Check out Craig Silverman’s proposal that they hire a librarian.
