Il Giornale is a national daily newspaper based in Milan, founded by Indro Montanelli in 1974, and among the most widely circulated news papers in Italy.
Business and internal management objectives had to be achieved in a context with three different codebases, one for each platform (web, iOS and Android), and the consequent difficulty of making corrective and evolutionary interventions.
The challenge in this project was twofold: the user experience and design of a new concept for loyal readers on the one hand, and the editorial requirements of back-office users on the other.
In the first analysis phase, aimed at highlighting the primary customer needs, it quickly became evident that the first design pillar was to ensure a smooth cross-platform experience. We wanted to create a product that had unambiguous navigation patterns.
We started with a series of methodological milestones typical of our projects: a needs assessment phase, analysis of the insights gathered so far, benchmarking of competitors and cases with the exact user needs, albeit in different fields.It then became clear that the concept design, more modern and closer to the redesign of the ilgiornale.it website, had to simultaneously recall the experience of consulting the digitized paper newspaper.
We published the new version of the mobile apps simultaneously on the Android and iOS stores, informing the user base to upgrade if automatic updates were disabled. At the same time, we published the new web version, immediately accessible to all subscribers.The result for users has been a painless transition to the new apps, which offer a smooth and consistent user experience on all devices, many new features that are immediately appreciated, and a product that is now modern and in line with the new mobile operating system standards on UI, privacy, and in-app payments.For the editorial staff, the new backoffice provides an overview of the status of the apps in one dashboard, from the daily digital copies from the press streams and published no earlier than the appointed time for all users, to the finally centralised management of subscriptions, with the possibility to intervene also on extensions, renewals, coupons and manual creation.Finally, for the development and maintenance team, an ease of intervention on the unique application code allowed them to analyse new requests and plan the release of new features.
