Year
2022
Client
CNN
PROJECT TYPE
A/B EXPERIMENT
CNN produces and publishes an enormous volume of live video and clips every day — it's core to what a news organization does. But CNN's video experience across digital surfaces was disjointed and unintentional.
Building on the Top News redesign, this project turned attention to video, where videos opened in multiple inconsistent ways across the app, with no clear affordances to distinguish content types. Once a video ended, there was nothing prompting further engagement. Every video view was a dead end instead of a doorway to the next one.
We designed Watch Next: a continuous video experience where a playlist of related videos auto-plays, built on recommendations from CNN's Machine Learning team.
Videos opened in a modal rather than inline, which unlocked technical benefits like picture-in-picture and multitasking — turning a single video view into a session.
The goal was to increase intentional video engagement without sacrificing the article reading experience Watch Next lived alongside.
For Users:
A seamless way to keep discovering relevant video content, with zero extra effort required after the first video ends.
For CNN:
Increase video starts and time spent — both of which directly support CNN's video ad revenue. Minimize negative impact to article engagement.
I owned the end-to-end design process from competitive analysis and video audits through user testing and final design iterations.
I analyzed competitors and audited CNN's in-app video experience alongside engineering, then interviewed CNN app users to understand their pain points and preferences around in-app video. From there I explored solutions — continuous scroll, a carousel, and Next Up CTAs — refined through user feedback, then partnered with ML to structure and run two rounds of A/B testing to validate the final approach. I prepared final design files to spec and carried the work through dev handoff with engineering and product.
Design decisions here were grounded in how people actually watch video in the app, validated through direct user testing and shaped by engineering feasibility.
I explored several approaches to continuous viewing — a continuous scroll, a carousel, and Next Up CTAs — and worked with UXR to test them through moderated interviews with CNN app users. Two themes shaped the direction: people wanted more video readily available without hunting for it, but didn't want autoplay taking over a session they hadn't asked for. Alongside that, I partnered with engineering to audit CNN's existing video experience and determine which approach was technically feasible to build and test.
An early single-placement test proved the concept and revealed a tradeoff worth solving before a full launch. Both rounds were tested on CNN's previous CMS.
Round 1 (Dec 2021): Testing Watch Next on Top News only drove a 57% lift in video starts, but article time spent dropped 6.76%.
Round 2 (April 2022): We tested three placements across ~450K users to see if we could keep the video lift while protecting article engagement.
Continuous viewing and relevant content discovery drives deeper engagement. Watch Next launched in June 2022, then went dark during a company-wide CMS and Design System migration, before returning built on a new foundation.
Validation and phased rollout:
T1 delivered the strongest results of any variant tested, with only a modest tradeoff to video ad starts — a clear enough signal to move forward with a phased rollout.
iOS + Android Launch (Aug, Oct 2023):
We carried the validated T1 experience forward but rebuilt on the new CMS and rolled out 2% → 100% in a week. Grew to 679k video starts/day — nearly half of all iOS video starts, with viewers averaging 3.90 starts vs. the iOS-wide 3.42.
