The 2015 election was the first that was really going to be played out online and we wanted to tap into sharing behaviour. To do this, the approach needed to be different from the “destination site” approach taken by other large news organisations. ITV’s advantage was the ability to create visual, punchy, accessible and sharable content and we wanted to give the editors the tools to support this.

We wanted to create content formats that made the election more understandable and captured popular opinion. Using this as our focus, we took some concepts into user testing and also went into the ITV news rooms to work with the journalists to understand their workflows and obstacles.

Some examples of a few of the content types we tested - "what I meant" and statistics:

Based on the outcomes of the testing it became apparent that people preferred to share light hearted, regionally skewed news. There was also a strong appreciation of visual news, both short form video and words overlaid on imagery. These both helped people understand the content faster.

Combining what users said, technical considerations, strategic alignment and editorial feasibility, we then prioritised the different options and moved ahead with development. The new content types we developed were:

Emphasis content blocks: a way for editors to add large numbers which would stand out in the content. They could be used for stats etc

Text on image: We wanted to provide a way for editors to create shareable, easy to understand content so developed a tool to make it easier for editors to quickly crop, rotate and annotate images. We think of content creators as users too and wanted to build tools that enhanced and sped up their workflow:

And of course there were some election specific pieces of functionality which included supporting ITV's unspun brand, highlighting political party tags in party colours, styling a "who should I vote for tool" - voting aid and a live updating dashboard on the night (including CSS animated coloured cubes for each party to reflect the broadcast branding).