Sparks Grove designed and built a new online newsroom for Delta Air Lines to support its desire to have a more robust content publishing platform and further Delta’s strategic goal of being a best-in-class, modern, and innovative airline. The goal was to create and build a digital news site with mobile and social capabilities that tells compelling and “shareworthy” stories so that Delta-generated content is being circulated and relied upon by its target audiences.

The tasks required to build the News Hub included conducting research and analyzing insights, selecting a technology platform and hosting provider, designing the visual experience, designing the desktop, tablet, and mobile experiences, installing monitoring and analytics tools, designing a desirable back-end publishing experience, developing the content strategy, conducting final testing, and launching. The timeline to design and build the News Hub was a total of 15 weeks.

The site has seen great results since its launch. During its first week, the site experienced on average 3,900 unique site visitors per business day (up 10% from the previous site), an impressive 40.23% bounce rate on the homepage (previously 71% site-wide), and 4.79 page views per user for homepage and 7.21 for News Archive (previously 2.2 actions per user). After the first three months, the site experienced 108% increase in total site visits, 98% increase in total page views, 5x the average page views, a 19% improved bounce rate, and a 468% increase in return visitors. The team will continue to use advanced analytics to increase recirculation, retention, engagement, referral, and acquisition, and will also monitor the site’s influence in garnering earned media.

Our team worked quickly to launch an MVP experience that met the needs of our target audience(s) by focusing on five key areas: Acquisition, Engagement, Referral, Retention, and Recirculation. The primary audience of the News Hub is journalists (broadcast, print, and digital), with Delta employees, business travelers, and aviation enthusiasts identified as secondary audiences. Based on initial user interviews, our team defined the MVP requirements.

We adopted best practices from some of the fastest-growing media companies like Buzzfeed and Upworthy to ensure the site is built to engage readers and encourage them to share content externally. Our team is constantly experimenting with new features and functionality by measuring user interactions and gathering qualitative and quantitative feedback.

The News Hub taxonomy is dynamic, and it can change over time. Our design approach is platform agnostic, so the site looks great on any screen at any size. The site was built to support rich media content including videos, images, and image galleries which are more interesting to readers and are more commonly shared.

The News Hub today won’t be the same 6 weeks or 6 months from now. It is built for experimentation, measurement, evaluation, learning and continuous transformation. While our initial launch has been successful, we know it is just the beginning of our journey.