May 7, 2021

New Unified app at The Telegraph

The move from two separate apps to the The Telegraph Unified app

The Telegraph is a broadsheet newspaper that was founded in London in 1855. For years, The Telegraph had 2 separate apps: a live news app and an edition app. Whilst this addressed the needs of some readers, it was often confusing for others.

For The Telegraph team, edition readers were missing live news curated by The Telegraph editors. Now thanks to the The Telegraph‘s unified app, readers’ have their news all in one place.

The role of unified apps at The Telegraph

The Telegraph made a bold and innovative move when they brought the Live News experience into their Digital Edition App creating the unified The Telegraph App for all their subscribers. With edition readers being amongst the most loyal and the edition product being seen as their premium product, The Telegraph didn’t want to make too many changes to this experience.

Adding the live news feature to the edition app experience was therefore the natural way for the innovation to go. Subscribers of the previous Live News app have now been migrated to the new Unified App Experience built on the Twipe Apps v4 NextGen Platform.


New user experience

This integration provides readers with a completely new user experience. Readers can access live news stories throughout the day on the app, whilst also having access to the day’s complete newspaper.

This provides readers with the ability to access The Telegraph‘s editorial curation for all their news needs. This integration has already seen more customers going between the edition and live news in the app than they have seen before.

We really see this product as the best place to consume our journalism and it’s living up to that so far

Louise Curtis, Product Manager at The Telegraph

“Newspaper reborn”

To better understand how readers perceive the NextGen edition, including its layout and features, a survey was conducted among more than 400 readers. Almost 90% of the readers found the overall experience to be better or the same as before. More than 30% of the readers found higher satisfaction in things such as the look and feel of the pages, ease of use, text readability, layout of images and content layout. One reader declared the new app to be a “newspaper re-born”, explaining that as a “news freak” this is the best app he’s tried. 

The Telegraph’s daily edition is not only a collection of articles, but it’s an entire print-like experience brought to the reader…and it’s quite unique!

Danny Lein, CEO & Founder at Twipe

A truly digital first experience with beautifully designed templates

Based on a set of 30 carefully designed templates, The Telegraph’s digital edition is now built daily using the Twipe NextGen technology. The templates strongly reflect the brand identity of The Telegraph and are enriched with elements that highlight the edition structure and composition including section fronts with teased articles, live sports results and book reviews.

Enhanced scannability for easy navigation

To allow The Telegraph’s readers to easily navigate the 180 articles published on average every day, the team has co-designed the page cards navigation. Through a simple and sleek interface, readers can navigate the entire publication using card previews and sections. 


The importance of interactive puzzles  

Industry research has confirmed the importance of puzzles and games in increasing engagement levels and habitual behaviour. NextGen technology allows easy integration of interactive puzzles that can be played directly inside the publication, making them a part of the reading experience and a tool to generate loyal subscribers.


Easy edition creation with Twipe NextGen Publishing Tools 

One of the problems the team at The Telegraph was looking to solve was simplifying the edition creation process. The ease of article creation, the possibility to collaborate among authors and the flexible preview function were some of the features that the team was looking for. With Twipe’s NextGen Publishing Tools, we were able to address these needs. We engaged in a collaboration journey to further develop the tools in order to address the additional requirements of The Telegraph’s editorial teams.


How has the unified app been received?

The new unified app is a big part of The Telegraph‘s subscriber first strategy. With an aim of reaching 1 million subscribers by 2023, the development of a new unified app has been crucial. The unified app is a subscriber only product and going forward, it is where The Telegraph hope to onboard the majority of their new subscribers. Whilst the unified app is still in its’ launch phase, it is going well.

Following on from this, The Telegraph have started to send out “Breaking News” notifications. These have helped to push greater reader engagement. The team will continue to use the notifications in a bid to greater engage subscribers and to stand out from the competition as being a full day product, not just a one-time morning read.


Working with Twipe

Choosing an external partner to develop the new unified app was a significant shift for The Telegraph. Traditionally, they have used an internal mobile development team.

Despite this change, the transition has gone smoothly. One of the most important features of the transition for The Telegraph has been the opportunity to work collaboratively with the Twipe team.

We’ve ended up with a product that I think has overdelivered on what we hoped to achieve in our first build

Louise Curtis, Product Manager at The Telegraph

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