Condé Nast Live Stories – Kristina Pedicone

Condé Nast

A New Content Format for Live Publishing

Overview

To maximize editorial voice and capture audience attention during live events, our multifunctional team established Live Stories, Condé Nast’s first real-time content format, in seven sprints. As a powerful new storytelling tool, Live Stories feature a new and improved editorial workflow for publishing instant, rich updates, plus optimizations for search and discovery.

After launching initially for Vanity Fair’s Oscar's coverage and seeing it exceed our target benchmarks for both traffic and time spent, Live Stories have since been used by nearly all Condé Nast brands to support everything from high-profile entertainment events like Vogue’s Met Gala, to important news moments like The New Yorker’s election reporting, to timely shopping and commerce experiences, like Wired’s Prime Day coverage.

Key Services

Experience Design

UX/UI

Design System

Strategy

Additional Info

Objective

The Live Stories team was an internal product collaboration between Platform, Video/Audio/Events, and Vanity Fair, formed with the specific objective of helping Condé Nast brands own the moment during live events. To do this, we set out to build a new content format and capability into our CMS, for publishing instant, live updates that would amplify editorial voice and increase engagement with readers during these important brand moments.

Process

Our work began with an initial phase of qualitative research with cross-functional stakeholders and leadership, to identify the key needs, capabilities, and opportunities for design exploration. Working within our existing Design System we then defined and designed a front-end reader experience of live content updates—including rich media and deep-linking capabilities, and integrated with our advertising platform—as well as a mobile-first back-end editor experience that supports a streamlined publishing workflow allowing editors to post and edit instantly from their phones while on site at the event.

To achieve organizational alignment, we brought our concept to life through stories, visuals, prototypes, and product demos, to elicit feedback and approvals from stakeholders and leadership throughout the entire process. And from the beginning, our core functionality and design decisions were put through robust user and content scenario evaluations to ensure adaptability across unique brands and event types. Working in tandem with engineers, we broke the concept into prioritized milestones so we could iterate on day-to-day features while continuing to make incremental steps toward our MVP launch and hone our longer-term product vision.

Result

The launch of the live story template for Vanity Fair’s Oscar night coverage was a stress-test for validating the new publishing capability, and along with exceeding our target benchmarks for traffic and time spent, the Vanity Fair team was also able to sell a major sponsorship against the experience. Since that initial release nearly all Condé Nast brands have adopted the new content format for use during their key tentpole events and have seen increased engagement metrics—for example, Vogue’s first Met Gala Live Story saw a 318% increase in traffic and a 162% increase in time spent, over the previous year’s coverage. Today, teams continue to leverage and build onto Live Stories, scaling the product with flexibility and cohesion.

Our work began with an initial phase of qualitative research with cross-functional stakeholders and leadership, to identify the key needs, capabilities, and opportunities for design exploration.

Working within our design system we then created a front-end reader experience based around a stream of live content updates that are instant, flexible, and include rich media and deep-linking capabilities.

To house our content, we also created a new page template for Live Stories. The template is fully integrated with the internal ad platform and features a flexible page header as well as a custom, content-aware sticky video player for live-streaming coverage.

The back-end editor experience is mobile-first, to support a streamlined publishing workflow that allows editors to post and edit instantly from their phones while on site at events.

Our work was divided into prioritized milestones, allowing us to iterate on features while continuing to make incremental steps toward our MVP and hone our longer-term product vision.

Since the initial launch, nearly all Condé Nast brands have adopted the Live Story content format for use during their key tentpole events and have seen increased engagement metrics.

In Vogue’s first use of the new capability, their Met Gala Live Story saw a 318% increase in traffic and a 162% increase in time spent, over their previous year’s coverage.