Improving subscriber events

The Economist's Editorial team aimed to invest more on video content as part of a broader strategy to diversify storytelling and engage a wider audience. Some of the video content were subscriber events (exclusive live discussions with The Economist journalists and experts), which were hosted externally, leading to a fragmented experience that limited discoverability and engagement. To fully leverage our events, we needed to integrate them seamlessly into our platforms.

• The project: End-to-end experience, UX/UI design, collaboration, stakeholders engagement and usability testing

• My role: I led the User Experience and User Interface for Video content across The Economist Web and App

• Collaborators: Events team, Marketing, Emails team, Senior leadership, user research, content design

• The impact: Improve engagement and retention

Problem statements

• Events are hosted externally: Subscriber events only existed in an external Wordpress website and weren’t promoted on The Economist platforms. Also, they were hosted on Zoom instead of The Economist’s own platforms, leading to longer user journeys and a high dropout rate.

• Limited discoverability: Events had low visibility on the website and were completely absent from the app, making it difficult for users to discover and engage with them compared to other content.

• Low engagement: Event attendees had minimal interaction with related content or discussions before and during the live event, reducing overall engagement.

Some data

• Previously disengaged subscribers are showing further engagement after attending an event. A fifth (20.3%) of subscribers who attended an event had no digital usage in the 4 weeks prior. Of those, 33% went on to show engagement after the event

• Positive impact on retention. Event attendees are up to 3% more likely to renew than low or non-engaged subscribers.

• On average 80% of people register to an event coming from an email promoting it. The rest comes from newsletters, onboarding, social media channels and print edition.

• On average, 39% of those who register for an event attend live. Additionally, on-demand views account for over a third of total registrants.

Main Objectives

The overarching objective was to reach more of our subscribers with events within the next three years. From a UX perspective, the primary objectives were:

• Host subscriber events directly on The Economist’s website (and later on the app) to simplify event registration and create a frictionless viewing experience with a custom video player.

• Improve event visibility across the website and make them as easy to find.

• Encourage more interaction before and during live events by integrating related content, notifications, and engagement features like live Q&A.

Plan of action

• Phase 1: Migrate event content to The Economist website, applying brand guidelines and making quick-win improvements. Design a custom video player to support the event experience.

• Phase 2: Conduct user research to identify opportunities across the end-to-end journey. Use insights to inform future iterations and guide design exploration.

Design discovery

Agree on key improvements

At the start of the project, I mapped out the full user journeys and reviewed them to spot pain points and areas we could improve. I then spoke with key stakeholders to better understand their views on the current experience and where they saw opportunities to make events more valuable in the future.

These early conversations led to a series of collaborative sessions and design reviews, helping us stay aligned and move towards final sign-off later in the process. From this initial work and discussions, we agreed on improving:

• Mandatory information input: Subscribers are required to provide their details each time they register, creating friction in the process.

• Lack of related content promotion: Event pages currently don’t offer a way to surface related articles, newsletters, or other relevant content.

• Enhance audience engagement: Improve how event registrants and attendees interact with editors by creating more meaningful ways to participate and feel heard.

• Email content issues: Emails are too long and fail to highlight key information, reducing their impact.

• Custom video player: A custom video player is needed to replace Zoom for a more tailored viewing experience.

• Design refresh: The need to reorganise information to improve layout, clarity and brand consistency.

Custom video player

To support our live-streamed events, we selected Brightcove for its fully customisable video player. My first step was to thoroughly analyse its features to understand its capabilities and limitations. Following this, I collaborated with engineers and stakeholders to define the MVP functionality, prioritising essential features for launch and identifying enhancements for future iterations. In addition to functionality, I focused on improving the player’s UI and accessibility.

MVP features:

• Progression bar

• Keep speed

• Keep resolution

• Keep captions (English only for MVP), except the custom settings

• Use Economist icons and fonts

• Define copy and UI or error screens

Post MVP features:

• Add "Share" and "Watch later"

• Displays a preview image of the according timestamp by hovering the mouse over the seek bar

• Explore video suggestions when video ends

• Introduce caption settings and customise the UI

• Picture-in-picture, we could a/b test it to evaluate if it's useful to our users

Shorter event registration

One of the key UX advantages of migrating events to the website was the ability to enable one-click registration for subscribers. Since we already had their details, they no longer had to re-enter information each time they wanted to register for an event. This streamlined process also included automatic email reminders and the option to easily add events to their calendar.

More event engagement

In the existing experience, we sent email reminders ahead of each event and allowed registered users to submit questions for the Editors, who would select and answer the most relevant ones during the live session. We aimed to keep and enhance this feature by introducing a dedicated section on the event page where users could submit questions both before and during the event. This not only gave the feature greater visibility but also encouraged higher audience engagement.

Before this change, Editors typically received only a few dozen questions per event. After introducing the dedicated question section on the event page, some events saw over 1,000 submissions, representing a dramatic increase in audience interaction. This not only boosted engagement but also gave the editorial team a much stronger signal to shape and plan the event content more effectively.

Emails content improvements

As part of the end-to-end experience, when a user registers to an event we would send:

• A confirmation email

• Reminder emails, 7 days and one day before the event

• An email on the event day and when the event starts

• An email a few days after the event when the footage is ready to be shared

Although a full review of the email communications wasn’t initially planned, we decided to optimise the content and design to make them more user-friendly. The main issue was that emails were too long, and key information wasn’t clearly highlighted or easy to scan. We addressed this by simplifying the copy and bringing essential event details (such as date, time, and access links) higher up in both confirmation and reminder emails, making the content more direct and accessible.

Promote related content

Last but not least, we saw the event pages as a valuable opportunity to promote related articles and topic-specific newsletters. As a quick win, I reused existing components from article pages, ensuring visual consistency across the site and speeding up implementation. Looking ahead, the next step would be to surface related events on article pages, creating a more connected and topic-driven experience.

Final designs

The outcomes

• Increased Engagement: Added new interactive features like pre-event question submissions, led to a major spike in user participation. Question submissions increased over 1,000% per event after adding a dedicated section on the event page.

• Higher Content Visibility: Promoted related articles and newsletters directly on event pages, increasing content discoverability across The Economist ecosystem.

• Stronger Analytics & Tracking: Enabled analytics for event pages, previously unavailable when events were hosted off-platform, unlocking actionable data for future improvements.

• Scalable Foundation for Growth: Established a flexible and scalable structure to support future video investments and align with the company’s long-term strategy.

Next steps

We chose to build and release the initial version of the event pages as quickly as possible to deliver immediate value. In parallel, I collaborated with the research team to plan a study aimed at uncovering user pain points and behaviours around events. The findings from the research would later inform future design iterations.