The challenge
For Página/12 it became particularly difficult after 2015 when a conservative party won the presidential elections. They struggled to survive financially, since they depended a lot on public fundings from the previous government with whom they were more aligned ideologically.
It began as a side project to complement the efforts of the commercial team who was trying to sell advertising plans. We set to explore the possibility of a subscription model for readers with no paywall, meaning all the content would be available for everyone, but subscribers would have access to an exclusive set of benefits. We were uncertain how users would respond and what kind of benefits would be appealing to them.
The team
The product owner, a sales specialist, a full stack developer and myself, working as a UX researcher, interaction and visual designer.
Research and analysis
I started by conducting interviews with the stakeholders to understand their vision and the business goals. After that, I made some user interviews scouted from an online survey, making sure the sample was diverse enough to cover all the demographic spectrum of the audience in terms of age, location, occupation and level of consumption. The survey also included some questions about possible benefits, just to have some more cuantitive input on that topic.
I complemented that information with a competitive analysis, to review the solutions other media products came up for this problem, looking for both local and international.
We found out that 70% of readers were willing to contribute financially only to maintain the newspaper, without any reward. Which was a key insight that made us build a simple solution fast, no program of benefits or deals with third parties needed. We decided to add some new features (such as commenting on articles and having video calls with journalists) for contributors instead of blocking existing ones for a free version. It was better to make membership attractive without penalizing our free users.
We understood that what made membership attractive was to be part of a community.
UI design
We tried to create a simple and seamless flow for users to subscribe even without a credit card. Of course a lot has changed since the program first launched, but here are some examples of our initial approach.
You can see it live here.
What I learned
Talk to your users first
Ship a MVP ASAP and start iterating
The program became a huge success and something that started as an experiment became a priority for the organization