Designing for sound off

From September 2015 to May 2016 I worked as a Senior Product Designer at NowThis in New York.

NowThis made news for social platforms, not for television. Most of its audience watched on a phone, in a feed, usually with the sound off, and decided in a second or two whether to keep watching. Video made for a TV screen failed there.

The team didn't need one perfect edit. It needed rules a whole newsroom could apply every day. Here's what that looked like, and why I think it still holds.

One story, three shapes

Every story existed in three cuts: vertical for phones, square for feeds, and wide for desktop and players.

I worked on the layout system for those cuts: where text sits, how big it is, and how captions and overlays carry a story that nobody is listening to. The point of a system is that the twentieth story of the day looks as considered as the first.

The six rules

We wrote these from real audience data.

1. Skip the intro. Get to the story immediately. Every second of setup is a second someone scrolls away.
2. Land it in seconds. In an endless feed, the point has to arrive before the thumb moves.
3. Design for silence. Text overlays mean anyone can follow, with or without sound.
4. Only essential audio. When the sound is on, use only what the story needs.
5. Guide the eye. Scale, emphasis and motion are directing tools. Use them with restraint.
6. Vertical first. Not a rotated landscape frame: bigger text, tighter framing, thumb-friendly.

None of these is clever on its own. What mattered was holding to all six on every story, on deadline.

A 20-minute interview became eight stories

When NowThis interviewed Vice President Joe Biden, a single 20-minute video would have lost most of its audience in the first minute.

So we cut it into eight short clips. Each one could stand alone and be shared on its own, but they were sequenced so you could also watch them in order. People chose their own depth: one clip, or the whole conversation.

That playlist pattern is close to how stories work on most platforms today.

The app that didn't ship

I also worked on research for a gesture-based NowThis news app. One idea was smart sharing: when you share a story, the app detects where it's going and sends the right cut, vertical to a phone and wide to a desktop, so nobody has to choose a format.

The app never shipped. The research still did its job. Real prototypes tested one-thumb navigation, offline viewing and format routing, and those findings fed the team's thinking. A prototype that answers its question has done its work, even if it never becomes a product.

What still holds

A decade later, the platforms have changed and the rules haven't.

• Design for the real context. Phone, feed, sound off. Not the ideal one you picture in the meeting room.
• Systems beat one-offs. A rule a newsroom can apply on deadline is worth more than a perfect single edit.
• Silence is the default. Assume nobody is listening, and let the picture and the words carry the story.

The NowThis work, with the prototype and a clip from the series, is in the case study.